This issue explores democratic futurism through AI—highlighting tools, stories, and frameworks for building more inclusive, human-centred digital futures.

We highlight the value of human-centered technology to solve problems and design the future. Technology is not as a replacement for human insight, but as a facilitator for deeper understanding and engagement.

The primary goal of this digital collaboration was to enable the nonprofit organization to efficiently review and ideate strategies to simplify and streamline their internal performance management business processes. It demonstrates how AI can enhance—not replace—human insight by surfacing shared perspectives within a nonprofit team, shifting their mindset from individual frustration to collective problem solving—and help democratize organizational decision-making.

We highlight the importance of dialogue, featuring the National Week of Conversation, insights on creating safe digital spaces, and discussions on technologies that foster mutual understanding.

The global backslide of democracy is evident, but people are still mobilizing, organizing, and winning—how can digital tools enable greater community engagement?

We dedicate this newsletter to the concept of pluralism — the idea that multiple distinct groups, beliefs, cultures, or values can coexist within a community. At its core, pluralism enshrines diversity of ideas because it enables social and political systems to thrive because they must collaborate to coexist. 

At its heart, democracy is about collective decision making. It is a way to solve common problems together and foster trust. Citizen Assemblies — used by governments and nonprofit organizations worldwide — are one way to promote democracy by increasing public engagement in government decisions.

This year will always remain firm in our memory. It was the year we took a bold leap to start this new non-profit organization: Common Good AI. The last 12 months have shown the power of navigating challenges together, as we used adaptive thinking to guide our way. We established Common Good AI because we see tremendous opportunities to foster community-based problem solving using digital collaboration at scale. As we look across 2024 and now forward to 2025, we are further emboldened that our vision to use new tools to promote inclusive civic engagement can happen if we continue to adapt and solve problems together. 

A group of thinkers in the Sustainable Development Goals Thought Leaders Circle (SDG TLC)  were inspired by United Nations’ (UN) General-Secretary António Guterres’ call for “deep and rapid transformation.” The group wanted to leverage the UN and its member states’ openness to new ways of working to propose radically new approaches. They used CrowdSmart and one facilitator commented, “The technology lets participants observe the universe from a different place, to see what's happening in the world from a different perspective.”

Common Good AI uses CrowdSmart.ai as a tool to promote civic engagement. The CrowdSmart.ai system was originally developed to evaluate the efficacy of business startups, so let's use that as an example to explain the architecture. 

We continue to receive messages from readers, who are enthusiastic about community-based problem solving using digital collaboration at scale. We’ve connected with a wide range of individuals, from strategists designing inclusive global governance systems to grassroots organizers hosting citizen dialogues to mitigate US polarization. It validates the need for new tools to promote inclusive civic engagement to find an actionable path forward together.

Village Media is a leader in community-based journalism who reach five million subscribers in over 150 small communities across North America. They collaborate with local news outlets to generate successful business approaches and high integrity journalistic content to build  profitable and sustainable local news sites. They are dedicated to making community news sustainable in markets of any size through a combination of industry-leading technology, community-based marketing programs, and award-winning editorial. 

As we learn and grow as an organization, we return to early collaborations to identify success factors and continue to improve our processes. This early case study is not a rigorous academic study, rather documentation of lessons learned based on key informant interviews.  When asked about how CrowdSmart helped bring participants to agreement around root causes, Dr. Garcia said, “this changed their minds… the term that comes to mind is empathy.”

The author explores the vulnerabilities in our democratic system that AI will affect. He advocates for “protected democratic deliberation,” akin to citizen assemblies, as a strategy to safeguard democracy in an AI-empowered world.

Welcome to our second newsletter.  Since our launch last month, we received positive feedback from many of you–thank you! In this newsletter, we highlight how we are building momentum around the idea of using collective intelligence to enable democratic engagement. Below, you will find several highlights from our ongoing outreach.

The Common Good AI story started at a meeting at MIT Media Lab, orchestrated by John Clippinger in March 2023. We had a shared vision of AI that looked beyond the current fascination with large language models. We gathered a group that included John Cordier, CEO of Epistemix, and Kim Polese (a co-founder of CrowdSmart).

As a new nonprofit organization, we are fuelled by the opportunity to advance effective grassroots democratic engagement by leveraging the power of human collective intelligence at scale. Using new forms of AI that facilitate collaborative dialogue and reasoning, people everywhere can now engage in productive conversations about the issues that matter to them, learn from each other, and collectively prioritize solutions together. 

We are launching this monthly newsletter to share updates about our initiatives, and we invite you to engage with us.

The capacity of groups to solve problems rests on finding common ground. At the moment, our nation and our world struggle. It is a struggle between building and preserving identity (be it national, political party, corporate, or individual) and the capacity to form bridges of understanding and knowledge discovery.

On July 4th, I took a long, four-and-one-half-hour, thoughtful walk. I am fortunate to live in a coastal community that celebrates July 4th simply and authentically. Farmer John drives his tractor down the main street. His father-in-law, a veteran of World War II, was interviewed in front of city hall, next to the famous Half Moon Bay "Sit Down the marching band." Some are older, and this year, the band seemed smaller.

In my walk, I absorbed the diversity of our community.

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Not all AI is democracy ending AI. Some can support democracy and make it better. In this episode, I talk to Kim Polese, whose career launching transformative technologies (beginning with Java) has landed with a democracy enhancing AI, CrowdSmart. We talk about its potential, as well as the open source alternative, pol.is.