Digital Democracy

// Digital Democracy

Technology doesn't only threaten democracy — it can renew it. From Taiwan's digital democrats to the streets of Camden, Carl has spent a decade reporting on and now building the tools that let thousands of people genuinely shape the decisions that govern them.

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Waves

Carl is Co-Director of Waves, a digital democratic process designed to include thousands of people in government policy decisions — built by a consortium of Demos, Camden and South Staffordshire Councils, and technologists. Waves moves between broad idea generation and narrower deliberative work across four stages, using bridge-based ranking to surface the statements that create common ground across polarised audiences. After six months of design and testing, it launched in Camden to help shape the borough's adult social care policy — recruiting through bus shelters and libraries as well as online, to reach residents digital processes usually exclude. The ambition: major policy change, and training 25 local governments to run Waves themselves. Read the launch announcement.

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Taiwan & The Civic Hackers

Carl's reporting from Taiwan — meeting the digital democrats and civic hackers who found a new way to run a country — helped bring vTaiwan-style crowdsourced democracy to Western attention: proof that the same technologies used to divide societies can be used to find their common ground.

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AI & The Public Square

Carl is a co-author of AI and the future of digital public squares (Collective Intelligence, 2026) — with more than two dozen researchers and technologists including Audrey Tang and Hélène Landemore — exploring how LLMs could power collective dialogue, bridging systems and community moderation at scale.

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Writing

• AI and the future of digital public squaresCollective Intelligence
• Weaving a New Web, New ScientistNew Scientist
• Apple Needs to Give Users’ Sovereignty Over Their DataWired
• The Rise and Fall of RedditTimes Literary Supplement
• Can Politics cope with the Digital age?Unherd
• Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attentionWired
• We will see the Rise of Civic HackersWired
• How Taiwan's 'civic hackers' helped find a new way to run the countryThe Guardian
• Taiwan’s Crowdsourced Democracy shows us how to fix social mediaWe Are Not Divided
• Leveraging AI for Democracy: Civic Innovation on the New Digital Playing FieldNational Endowment for Democracy
• Recursive Public: Piloting Connected Democratic Engagement with AI GovernanceChatham House
• Vox Digitas: Understanding Political Attitudes from TwitterDemos
• The Rise of Digital PoliticsDemos

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Selected Media

• How AI Will Affect the 2024 Elections — with Renée DiRestaYour Undivided Attention
• Can Technology Save Democracy?Discussion
• Facebook, Free Speech and the Fight for Digital Democracy — with Marietje SchaakePodcast
• Can We Code Power Responsibly?AI & Equality

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