Open Access Resource
Open Course: Designing Democratic Engagement with AI
This free, self-paced course equips public officials with the skills to design, run and learn from meaningful engagement with communities.
Digital Civic Infrastructure
Technology to support how the people are informed, heard, and served.
Democracy’s core infrastructure is failing under 21st-century load. Citizens cannot find, understand, or respond to the legal and regulatory texts that govern their lives. Public comment processes generate volume no human can read. Constituent voice arrives in formats agencies cannot process. Service delivery is splintered across jurisdictions whose boundaries no longer match the problems people face. The sum total of these effects leaves people feeling disempowered, alienated from institutions, and overlooked by their elected officials. Meanwhile, technology is reshaping how information is produced and consumed faster than democratic institutions can adapt—with the open question of whether new tools will make democratic agency real or further concentrate power.
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation’s Digital Civic Infrastructure initiative aims to understand how technology can strengthen democratic agency through improving how civic voice is developed and gathered, how public input becomes policy, and how decisions get enforced and services delivered. The Lab develops the theoretical foundations guiding renovation, supports pilot design and tools with place-based collaborators, and publishes evaluative standards that the field can adopt.
Open Book: Open-Source Budget Transparency for Municipalities
With a majority of municipalities publishing their budgets as PDFs, Open Book offers a free alternative that towns own and run themselves.
The Landscape of Digital Civic Infrastructure in Massachusetts
Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation authors offer the first comprehensive analysis of how Massachusetts municipalities are using technology to support civic engagement, government decision-making, and public service delivery.
Update Massachusetts Open Meeting Law for the Digital Age
As technology reshapes how public officials communicate with their communities, this policy brief offers recommendations for modernizing Massachusetts Open Meeting Law to protect transparency and accountability while enabling the tools that expand access to government.
Massachusetts Municipal Leader Guide: Open Meeting Law in the Digital Age
As public officials increasingly turn to digital tools, this guide helps Massachusetts municipal leaders navigate Open Meeting Law and their everyday digital practice while safeguarding transparency.
Additional Resources
Commentary
The Hidden Cost of Cord Cutting: Losing Access to Civic Life
As cord-cutting erodes the funding that sustains local cable access channels, this piece from the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation offers recommendations for preserving vital sources of community information, government transparency, and civic participation.
Additional Resource
The Ecosystem of Deliberative Technologies for Public Input
Ensuring public opinion and policy preferences are reflected in policy outcomes is essential to a functional democracy. A growing ecosystem of deliberative technologies aims to improve the input-to-action loop between people and their governments.
Feature
Digital Civic Infrastructure for Massachusetts Workshop
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and Bloomberg Center for Cities brought together civic technologists, researchers, as well as municipal and state leaders across Massachusetts for a workshop on digital civic infrastructure.
Additional Resource
A Framework for Digital Civic Infrastructure
Creating a healthy digital civic infrastructure ecosystem means not just deploying technology for the sake of efficiency, but thoughtfully designing tools built to enhance democratic engagement from connection to action.
Video
Building a Digital Democracy with Audrey Tang and Megan Smith
The “Building a Digital Democracy” panel brought together Audrey Tang, Megan Smith, Professor Danielle Allen, and Professor Mathias Risse for a conversation on how technology is being used to transform our political institutions.