On September 28, Public Democracy Los Angeles (PDLA) and Los Angeles Democracy Vouchers (LADV) led a mock election and civic assembly  at the Congress of Neighborhoods at Los Angeles City Hall. With around 25 participants, the event highlighted two innovative democratic tools—democracy vouchers and civic assemblies—that PDLA views as stepping stones toward more local engagement on addressing key issues that directly impact communities. What are Democracy Vouchers and Why Are

Public Democracy Los Angeles (PDLA) recently hosted a mock assembly for its members that gave participants a firsthand look at what it means to dive deep into a complex policy issue, reflect on their values, and make data-informed decisions. The topic? A pressing question for Los Angeles: “Should the city support a housing first approach to homelessness?” This event not only offered PDLA members an immersive civic assembly experience but also provided us with valuable insight

On September 23, 2021, Linn Davis ( Healthy Democracy ) and Wayne Liebman (Public Access Democracy) traveled to Sacramento for the California League of Cities Conference, an annual gathering of mayors and city council members from across the state. They presented a workshop on Lottery Selected Panels as an out of the box technique to approach difficult municipal decisions. About 200 municipal government personnel attended the presentation, including the city manager of the no

I attended the Citizens Assembly School   FIDE  conference April 18-20. The following is my brief overview: Deliberative Assemblies have been growing in popularity lately, as any search on the terms deliberative democracy/assembly will show. The conference highlighted the efforts to develop deliberative assemblies, including the wide range of challenges in making them into common practices in the US. So what are some of the key considerations for putting this process into act

Decidim is a software framework for citizan participation in democratic processes. These processes can involve elections, sortitions, referenda, initiatives, and other processes, or even multiple independent processes, as the system is configured on an ongoing basis. The public participates in the political activity topics using smart phones, computers, etc. The Decidim system gradually developed after the May 15 2011 political movement in Spain, and the resulting Podemos mov

When people are asked whether they live in a democracy, they often respond based on the state of their national government, and whether it’s responsive to election outcomes. Perhaps we should answer instead by thinking about the state of democracy in our citizens and town. Local democracy is the level of democracy in which most human beings participate. But we don’t have the same rankings, measures and data to compare cities on democracy that institutions like V-Dem or Freedo