---
title: E-Democracy
type: ngo
status: inactive
country: US
website: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://e-democracy.org
summary: A Minnesota-based nonprofit (founded 1994) pioneering online civic participation
  — running neighbourhood discussion forums that connect residents directly with local
  elected officials.
concepts:
- democracy-tools
- deliberative-democracy
- e-government
- direct-democracy
location:
  latitude: 44.9537
  longitude: -93.09
  name: St. Paul, Minnesota, US
activity:
  manual:
    checked: 2026-06-09
    note: blog.e-democracy.org returning 503; Wayback capture 2026-05-16 confirms
      recently alive — likely temporary outage
  dod:
    checked: 2026-07-05
    date: 2026-07-05
    note: e-democracy.org redirects to blog.e-democracy.org, which returned 503 on
      this check; same intermittent-outage pattern as prior run's Wayback corroboration
last_checked: '2026-07-05'
---

E-Democracy is one of the oldest civic participation nonprofits on the internet, founded in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1994 by Steven Clift. Its core insight, developed through three decades of practice, is that place-based online forums — organised around neighbourhoods rather than issues — generate more sustained civic participation than issue-advocacy platforms.

The organisation runs **Neighbourhoods Online** (and related forum networks in the US, UK, and New Zealand), which convene residents, local government staff, and elected officials in the same discussion space. Elected officials are expected to respond, creating informal accountability at a hyperlocal scale.

Unlike many civic tech projects that focus on transactional government services, E-Democracy's model is relational: the goal is ongoing conversation rather than one-off petitions or votes. The forums are lightly moderated and free to join.

E-Democracy was a founding member and early influence on what became the broader civic tech movement. Its decade-plus head start makes it a reference point for practitioners thinking about what sustained online civic participation actually looks like in practice.

## Key people

- **Steven Clift** — founder; one of the earliest practitioners of e-democracy as a discipline. Coined widely-used terminology in the field.

## Links

- Website: [e-democracy.org](https://e-democracy.org)

## See also

- [Deliberative Democracy](../concepts/deliberative-democracy.md)
- [E-Government](../concepts/e-government.md)
- [Direct Democracy](../concepts/direct-democracy.md)