# Democracy Landscape geographic coverage gap — actioned 2026-08-09

## 2026-08-09 action: 33 new org pages added

The research pass logged below was actioned same day. 33 organisations across all five
gap regions were researched, verified, and added to the Democracy Landscape. Websites
confirmed active for all entries.

| Region | New orgs added | Countries now represented |
|---|---|---|
| Latin America | 10 | BR (4), CL (3), CO (3) |
| Africa | 5 | SN (2), KE (1), ZA (1), NG (1) — pan-African scope |
| Continental Europe | 8 | IT (1), DK (1), NO (1), PL (1), CH (1), FI (1), SE (1), BE (1) |
| East/Southeast Asia | 5 | JP (2), KR (1), ID (1), US (1 global) |
| New Zealand | 5 | NZ (5) |

Full list of added pages: delibera-brasil, ciudadania-inteligente, fide, we-do-democracy,
team-mirai, fundacja-stocznia, labsus, wecollect, sitra, africtivistes, socentral, pspd,
code-for-japan, ctin, movilizatorio, make-it-16, tinz, perludem, digidem-lab, open-knowledge-brasil,
instituto-update, its-rio, espacio-publico, congreso-visible, transparencia-por-colombia,
governance-hub-africa, goree-institute, civic-hive, helen-clark-foundation, mcguinness-institute,
nzccl, foro-nacional-por-colombia, people-powered.

Total org pages: 156 (up from ~120), 225 knowledge-graph nodes (up from ~190).
Build passes, no broken internal links.

Remaining known gaps not yet filled:
- Indonesia civic tech (KawalPemilu — project not org, needs further vetting)
- Seoul participatory budgeting (government programme, not independent org)
- Portugal, Netherlands (no strong independent candidate orgs surfaced)
- Brazil participatory budgeting legacy org (Rede Nossa São Paulo — site unreachable during research)
- African country-level orgs beyond the pan-African networks added

---

## What was asked

While reviewing map-marker/logo work across the Democracy Landscape, a DOD
member asked whether org coverage is now reasonably complete. Short answer:
no — what shipped recently (logos, `location.precision: city` flags,
thumbnail rendering) was data-quality cleanup for orgs already in the
landscape, not a research push to broaden which orgs are represented.
Framed as "flag and move on, but note what to focus on" — logged here as a
research-leads list for a future pass, not a request to add entries now.

## What was found

Active-org country distribution (106 active orgs, checked 2026-08-09):

- Australia: 32 (30% of the entire landscape)
- US 8, GB 7, India/Germany/China/Canada 4 each, Taiwan/Israel/France/Austria 3 each
- 28 other countries represented by exactly 1 org each

This tracks with DOD's own Melbourne origins (see the new
[Designing Open Democracy](../docs/organisations/designing-open-democracy.md)
landscape entry) more than a systematic global survey — the list looks like
"what DOD's own network has encountered," which is a reasonable way for a
volunteer-curated landscape to grow organically, but worth being explicit
about rather than presenting as comprehensive.

## Where coverage is thinnest — research priorities if/when someone picks this up

- **Latin America** — 6 countries (AR, BO, EC, MX, VE, CU), 1 org each.
  Brazil is a notable absence given Porto Alegre's role as the origin city
  of participatory budgeting; Chile and Colombia also missing despite
  active constitutional-reform and civic-tech scenes. No specific
  candidate orgs vetted yet — genuinely open research, not a shortlist.
- **Africa** — 5 countries (NG, GH, KE, ZA, RW), 1 org each. Most of the
  continent (54 countries) unrepresented. Open research, no shortlist yet.
- **Continental Europe beyond DE/FR/AT/ES/BE** — Italy, Netherlands,
  Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Nordics beyond Sweden/Iceland
  (Denmark, Norway, Finland) all absent. Given Decidim/Consul Democracy's
  European origins are already covered, this is plausibly the easiest gap
  to close — European civic-tech/deliberative-democracy networks tend to
  be well-documented in English.
- **East/Southeast Asia beyond CN/TW/IN** — Japan, South Korea, and
  Indonesia (the world's third-largest democracy) all absent. One concrete,
  already-sourced lead: **Team Mirai** (Japan) — cited in the
  [RadicalxChange](../docs/organisations/radicalxchange.md) entry as "a
  party citing the Plurality framework [that] won parliamentary seats in
  the 2026 election."[^rxc] Worth its own entry rather than only being a
  footnote on RadicalxChange's page. South Korea and Indonesia: open
  research, no candidate identified yet.
- **New Zealand** — 1 org (Loomio, itself a tool/cooperative rather than a
  government-facing deliberative-democracy effort). NZ has an active
  local-government participatory-budgeting and citizens'-assembly scene
  that isn't represented at all yet.

## Note on precedent

This is the same "log the gap, don't force an unresearched addition" pattern
already used in
[2026-08-03-right-wing-democratic-innovation-gap.md](2026-08-03-right-wing-democratic-innovation-gap.md)
for the party-governance comparison's ideological skew. Geographic skew
here is the landscape-wide analogue of that same instinct: name the gap
precisely, avoid padding the numbers with under-researched entries just to
look more global, and leave a clear trail for whoever picks it up next
(human or AI) to start from priorities rather than a blank search.

[^rxc]: [RadicalxChange Foundation](../docs/organisations/radicalxchange.md) landscape entry, summary and Key people section.
