HeyJaredDemocracy Innovators Podcast
The Democracy Innovators Podcast is an independent publication launched in February 2025 by Alessandro Oppo and Carlo Michaelis.Society is complex, and technology is evolving rapidly.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
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- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
Thomas Lorenz on Brief nach Berlin, lowering barriers to participation & open-source civic tech (opens the original)
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Thomas Lorenz discusses Brief nach Berlin, an open-source, AI-assisted tool that helps citizens identify the appropriate political representative, draft a letter about a local concern and then copy it by hand. The conversation uses this practical project to examine how civic technology can lower barriers to participation while preserving meaningful human action. It also considers AI’s risks for privacy, dependence and social isolation, as well as its potential to make public administration more
Terry Bouricius on multi-body sortition and redesigning democratic lawmaking (opens the original)
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Terry Bouricius is a former Vermont lawmaker who has spent decades working on democracy reform, now focused on sortition — the use of random selection to form representative citizens’ bodies. His experience as both a politician and reformer led him to question whether elections are actually democratic. In this episode, he explains why he sees elected legislatures as inherently oligarchic, drawing on citizens’ assemblies, ancient Athens, and experiments in Ireland and elsewhere. We discuss how ra
Malik Lakoubay from Dark Matter Labs on financing civic infrastructure and democratic innovation (opens the original)
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Malik Lakoubay is a system builder and co-runs the Expanding Civilizational Optionality initiative at Dark Matter Labs, working at the intersection of civic infrastructure, finance, technology, and democratic renewal. In this episode, he explores how technology can enable new forms of participation and collective decision-making, from quadratic voting to community sensing in Mumbai. The conversation takes a provocative turn into “civic finance”: treating civic infrastructure as an asset class an
Olivier Schulbaum on democracy after the platform and the struggle for democratic infrastructures (opens the original)
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Olivier Schulbaum co-founded Platoniq, a foundation at the intersection of participation, civic technology, culture, social innovation and democratic experimentation. He explains why citizen assemblies on sensitive issues should begin with those most affected, allowing them to shape the agenda before experts frame the question. The conversation also examines how institutional “technification” can drain citizens’ proposals of their original meaning. It then turns to GRID, an experimental AI agent
Ryan Koch from the Civic Tech Chat podcast on civic innovation and effective use of AI (opens the original)
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Ryan Koch, host of Civic Tech Chat, joins Alessandro Oppo for a cross-podcast conversation about the evolution of civic tech and the growing role of AI in public-interest technology. They discuss volunteer civic-tech communities, faster prototyping, public data, and the boundaries between civic tech, gov tech, and public-interest tech. The conversation also examines deterministic systems, AI guardrails, explainability, human oversight in public services, the political choices embedded in softwar
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