Building common ground for the common good.

Dear Subscriber First Name,

This year was about building the foundations for what comes next. As 2025 ends, we are poised for big things in 2026.

In this newsletter, we highlight the recent events, projects, and cooperatives where we’re designing new ways for people to solve problems together at scale. From a workshop in Barcelona to state-level projects across the US, we’re putting bold ideas into practice and showing how communities can use new tools to find common ground and inform real collective decision-making.

This growing movement is not a single effort but a network of people and organizations building practical tools, methods, and digital architecture for new ways of working together. At Common Good AI, our role is to connect practitioners driving social change with new technologies so we can develop game-changing solutions to our most pressing challenges.

We’re proud of what we’ve built this year, and there’s much more ahead. We wish you a restful end of the year and, as always, we’re happy to connect about how digital technology might support your work. Write to us at info@commongoodai.org.

All the best,

Victoria Stanski, Managing Director

With Founders, John Seely Brown, John Clippinger, John Cordier, Tom Kehler, and Kim Polese

Workshop: From Barcelona to Beyond - Deliberative Tech for Peace and Democracy

We were thrilled to take part in the dedicated deliberative tech track led by the Toda Peace Institute under Dr. Lisa Schirch’s leadership, where powerful case studies that showcased the conflict-resolving and democracy-building potential of emerging technologies.

Alongside 30+ peers, we explored how digital tools can foster civic trust and engagement, including how the ZKE project in Kenya used Talk to the City to engage Gen Z protesters and how Alliance for Middle East Peace used Remesh and Pol.is with peace builders in Israel and Palestine.

We contributed to the workshop organizing and will inform the publication of a global handbook on digital deliberative process design. With more than 200 deliberative and civic-engagement tools available, this feels like the moment to move from invention to awareness, adoption, and scaling—more to come in 2026.

New Project: Launching The American Forum - Three State Project

Common Good AI joined a flagship project, in partnership with The People and The Civic Health Project, to demonstrate the power of citizen deliberation at statewide scale. Next year starting in South Carolina, then Nevada and New Hampshire, we are launching groundbreaking deliberative programs that convert citizens' collective intelligence into smarter legislative outcomes.

Led by talented local leaders, powered by GoVocal, and boosted by Google's AI sensemaking capabilities, each of these statewide programs will collect ideas across tens of thousands of adult residents, deliberate on the best ideas in smaller dialogue and assembly-style forums, and work collaboratively with bipartisan legislators to advance meaningful, viable, constituent-led recommendations into each state's January 2027 legislative session.

 Architecture: Polity, a new cooperative for democratic tools

Common Good AI is participating in the design and launch of Polity, a new global cooperative for democratic digital governance. Polity aims to revolutionize how groups make decisions and share data by combining decision-making technology using a cooperative ownership model. The goal is to empower communities, governments, and organizations to make participatory, transparent, data-driven decisions while democratizing data and safeguarding privacy.

Bringing together technologists, governance experts, indigenous leaders, activists, and others, Polity is designing a new architecture to make this technology truly people-centered. Strategic planning is now underway to define 2026 priorities and position Polity as core infrastructure for collective intelligence and systemic change, which is central to Common Good AI’s vision. More information to come! 

 We wish you a happy holiday season. Thank you for being part of our 2025—to much more in 2026!