DemocracyNext

🇱🇺 We've spent this week in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg with our partners at Ville d'Esch-sur-Alzette and Cultures of Assembly at University of Luxembourg. Many thanks for your warm welcome, and for showing us some local delicacies as well! We're excited to be working together to design and plan the city's institutionalised citizens' assembly. The first assembly will take place in autumn 2025. More details soon 👀 We spent the past few days meeting with Mayor Christian Weis, Alderman for Participation Bruno Cavaleiro, and other elected officials from the opposition and other parties, with General Secretary Jean-Paul Espen and colleagues in the Departments of Urban Planning, Social Cohesion, Sustainability, and Communications, as well as with Markus Miessen, César Reyes Nájera & Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen from Cultures of Assembly. Additionally, we met with Raphaël Kies, Emilien Paulis, and Lisa Verhasselt to discuss the assembly's evaluation - critical to ensure learning about impact and aspects to iterate for future assemblies. We also tested out some new tech options to experiment with a new way to enable simultaneous interpretation in multi-lingual settings (the assembly will be in five languages!). And of course, we were happy to have some in-person time together as Team DemNext with Claudia Chwalisz, James MacDonald-Nelson, Hannah Terry, Jonathan Moskovic, Eugene Yi, and Fatima ROUGI 😊 🌆 Read more about our Cities Programme and work with Esch-sur-Alzette: https://lnkd.in/gJ7YZiU5

If you're intrigued by randomly selected citizens' assemblies, but sceptical about how democratic they can be, add this podcast to your list! It asks all the important questions and gets good answers too.

🎙️ "The rhetoric around democracy is so wildly distant from the reality. A civic assembly just closes that gap a little." Appearing on Bard College's fine podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz", writer Nick Romeo has added new, compelling, and at times poignant judgments to his account of being an observer at the Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness, held last year in the US state of Oregon. Roger Berkowitz pressed Romeo on many issues that critics have about civic (or citizens') assemblies, in which a group of ordinary people are chosen from a community or nation to solve a tough policy question. Such assemblies typically meet over several days, are briefed by experts, deliberate in small groups and then propose new ideas that pass a supermajority vote. For instance, Berkowitz asked, does random selection really work? Can experts manipulate the people chosen or the briefings they get? Don't the loudmouths take over? What role do elected officials have? Can ordinary people really replace or stand up to experts? Does such deliberation really produce out-of-the-box ideas? Does anyone do anything about what such an assembly decides? How do you judge success? Should such assemblies actually be permanent? We won't spoil the plot by giving all the answers. But Romeo fielded all these questions in a way that showed how transformative it is to actually see a civic assembly at work. (We gave an equally enthusiastic shout-out for his Dec. 31 article in The New Yorker about the experience.) As he learned, there was plenty of analysis of data and trends, but also something else: "An abstract issue [that] can very quickly become politicised just instantly becomes humanised when you're … in the same room … listening to someone telling you how when they were 15 they had to sleep in small tunnels on children's playgrounds for warmth and safety … whatever your causal story about homelessness, a lot of folks … described changing their minds because of the power of these individual testimonies." https://lnkd.in/dSkRFy_G

ICYMI 👇

Join us for an official AI Action Summit event in Paris : "Aligning Urban AI and Global AI Governance" ,will bring together global leaders, policymakers, technologists, and visionaries to explore the intersection between artificial intelligence in urban environments and the frameworks of global AI governance. 📅 Date: February 11, 2025, 3:00-6:00pm CET 📍 Location: Paris, France (will be shared upon registration) 🔗 Program and Registration: https://lnkd.in/eb8xfJh9 Co-organized by Urban AI and The GovLab, in collaboration with MEDEF, OpenDataFrance, DemocracyNext and UN-Habitat Urban Lab What to Expect: 🌍 Best practices for governing and deploying AI in cities (AI Localism) 🔑 Ethical considerations and trust-building in urban AI 📜 Regulatory strategies to align local solutions with global governance of AI Read more about AI Localism: https://lnkd.in/dgGUXbed Check out our AI Localism repository: https://lnkd.in/dSmezsH Read more about Urban AI’s work: https://lnkd.in/e7cBy5NY Article on The Case for Local and Regional Public Engagement in Governing Artificial Intelligence https://lnkd.in/eTns2pAy #UrbanAI #GlobalGovernance #AIActionSummit #Cities #Artificialintelligence

How can artificial intelligence be governed responsibly? Ahead of the Paris AI Action Summit, DemocracyNext is making the case for local AI engagement and governance. Read their proposals below👇

Our Birmingham Museums Citizens’ Jury report is now live! Last night, everyday residents of Birmingham presented all of their hard work from the past four months to the Birmingham Museums Trust leadership team, its stakeholders, as well as influencers from the broader cultural and heritage sector. The citizens’ jury produced 11 ‘roles of the museum’ that reflected their feelings on a museum's overall purpose, and 20 recommendations on how to move towards museums that work for all. The recommendations were categorised broadly under four themes: 💷 Funding and marketing 👨👩👧👦 Community engagement and collaboration 🦽 New audiences, accessibility and inclusivity 🗣️ Exploring diverse perspectives This was the first ever citizens’ jury to take place in a museum in the UK, and we are truly excited to see how other cultural institutions can build on its learnings. To find out more about the process and read the full list of recommendations, check out the report below 👇 Birmingham Museums Trust DemocracyNext Lucy Reid Rob Lewis Sara Wajid Zak Mensah #Citizensassembly #Birmingham #Deliberativedemocracy #Museums

This has been such an incredible project to be a part of. As a student, I remember a conversation with someone who worked in a museum about how the real "value" for the museum was in the café attached to it. For visitors, the value of the museum was not in the objects it held and the stories it told, but in the pleasant remote working space it provided. We heard time and again from participants on this jury that museums were ‘old’, ‘stuffy’, ‘elitist’, ‘not relevant’. But I was struck yesterday by a comment that Sara (co-CEO BMT) made in her opening words at the launch event. Museums are radical projects at heart. They are publicly funded for a start, at a time when public money is in increasingly short supply. How would you make the case for that today? Yesterday, representatives from across the culture and heritage sector saw what can happen when a museum embraces that radical spirit and puts its trust in the people it serves. Birmingham Museums Trust has found in its Jury some fiercely committed advocates, both for the museum and its mission to deepen democracy. It’s time we see more cultural institutions fully embrace that radical spirit on which they were founded. Birmingham Museums Trust DemocracyNext Mara Livermore Caroline Tosal-Suprun Peter Bryant Rob Lewis Lucy Reid #CitizensAssembly #DeliberativeDemocracy #Sortition #Museums

Birmingham Museums Trust recently launched the UK’s first-ever Citizens’ Jury in a museum setting and DemocracyNext's very own Lucy Reid along with Shared Future CIC and numerous other key actors played a role in bringing it to life! The assembly members were tasked with drafting recommendations to answer the following question: 'What does Birmingham need and want from its museums now and in the future?' Check out more about the project below!

❓ 🖼️ How can we democratise museums? Citizens in Birmingham are leading the way, as Birmingham Museums Trust becomes the first UK museum to hold a citizens' jury, facilitated by Shared Future CIC. Our COO Lucy Reid acted as a critical friend and advisor to Co-CEOs Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah, Rob Lewis and the museums team, and was at last night's recommendations launch. This lovely film by River Rea Films tells the story of what happened. #museums #citizens #citizensassemblies 👇