About Us
Our Mission
Our work brings data science to deliberative democracy.
Our Vision
We envision a world in which governance better reflects public will.
Our Approach
The Computational Democracy Project was founded in 2018 as a non-profit continuation of Polis's open source work and the mission behind it. Primarily, the organization considers how what is possible in collective intelligence might advance over the course of the next century, given advancements in machine learning, and how we can enable those who seek to empower citizens to operationalize those advancements in policy-making processes.
We believe democratic processes benefit when human voices are treated with the deepest possible respect, and have seen firsthand how new methods of synthesizing human voices can be immensely powerful agents of change. Ultimately, we seek a world in which political agenda-setting power rests in the hands of the most inclusive possible set of engaged citizens and independent public servants, rather than in the hands of established factions, special interests, parties, and pundits.
To accomplish this, we research, develop, support and maintain open tools and systems which leverage advanced mathematics and computation to enable novel processes of citizen driven decision making, public deliberation and participatory self governance. We design for collective intelligence applied towards the public good, and pioneer new methods and tools that enable facilitators of all kinds to listen effectively at ever-larger scales. As data science methods advance, CompDem will continue to use them to push the bounds of what's possible in democratic methods, bringing them to bear on the most complex problems facing humanity.
Read about our strategy and key activities