---
title: Designing Open Democracy
type: research
status: active
country: AU
website: https://www.designingopendemocracy.com
logo: /assets/dodlogo_transparent.png
contact:
  channels:
  - type: telegram
    url: https://t.me/joinchat/HNk_UBX8A7jBPJPbAZU5Zg
    label: Telegram
    note: main point of contact; day-to-day discussion and coordination
  source: https://www.designingopendemocracy.com
  checked: '2026-08-13'
summary: An Australian-operated, nonpartisan forum of process engineers, social architects,
  and philosophers exploring how technology, engineering, and social-systems design
  can improve democracy — running since December 2016. This is DOD's own site, so
  this entry is self-authored rather than third-party researched.
concepts:
- meta-organisation
- deliberative-democracy
- accountability-sink
- cybernetic-governance
location:
  latitude: -37.8136
  longitude: 144.9631
  name: Melbourne, Australia
  precision: city
events:
- date: '2016-12-19'
  title: Held its first meetup
  url: https://www.designingopendemocracy.com/blog/2016/12/19/inaugural-designing-open-democracy-meeting/
  quote: Thanks very much to all who were able to attend the first Designing Open
    Democracy Meetup!
  note: DOD's own mirror of the original meetup.com post-meeting message, dated 19
    December 2016 — a more specific source than the generic meetup.com group page
    this event previously cited.
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-12'
  notable: true
- date: '2018-02-10'
  title: Published its "Proposed (Initial) Strategy" outlining the group's founding
    direction
  url: https://www.designingopendemocracy.com/blog/2018/02/10/proposed-initial-strategy-of-designing-open-democracy/
  quote: Designing Open Democracy so far has centered on the niche topic of “Democratic
    System Reform” and is a gathering of minds to think about ways that our current
    system could be improved, without endorsing any particular system.
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-12'
  notable: false
activity:
  manual:
    checked: 2026-08-07
    date: 2026-08-07
    note: This entry, and everything else on this site, is evidence of its own activity.
  sitemap:
    date: 2026-08-17
    note: Page last modified (from sitemap)
    url: https://designingopendemocracy.com/sitemap.xml
    checked: 2026-08-17
last_checked: '2026-08-09'
---

*A note on this entry: every other page in the Democracy Landscape is DOD monitoring an organisation from the outside, arm's length, no formal relationship. This one is different — DOD writing about itself, on its own site. Read it with that in mind rather than as independent verification.*

Designing Open Democracy (DOD) is an Australian-operated, nonpartisan forum of process engineers, social architects, and philosophers exploring how technology, engineering, and the design of social systems can be applied to democracy at every level of society. It is agnostic about *which* democratic model is right, but not about *whether* a system is genuinely trying to serve its people — see the [Accountability Framework](../projects/accountability-framework/index.md) for how that distinction gets applied in practice.

DOD held its first meetup in December 2016, in the middle of the same wave of protest-born civic-tech efforts — Loomio, DemocracyOS, vTaiwan, Flux — documented in [Occupy to Plurality](../blog/posts/2026-08-07-civic-tech-wave-2010s.md). Rather than build a platform or run for office, DOD took a third path: podcasting, hosting meetups, and — since 2026 — maintaining this site as a public "Democracy Landscape" documenting other organisations' efforts, including the ones that came and went before DOD started writing any of this down.

## Meta-organisation

Some in the group describe DOD as a [meta-organisation](../concepts/meta-organisation.md) — its role is to pay attention across the reform landscape rather than push any one mechanism, on the premise that most reform ideas being tried have been tried before and the lesson shouldn't have to be re-learned from scratch each time. It's a premise held by a few people in the group, not a settled institutional position — see [Philosophy](../philosophy/index.md) for it posed as an open question.

## What DOD does

- **Podcast and meetups** — recorded discussions with practitioners, researchers, and people building democracy-reform projects, going back to 2016
- **The Democracy Landscape** — this site's [organisations index](index.md), tracking who's working on what, whether they're still active, and what happened when they weren't
- **The Accountability Framework** — DOD's standard for what belongs in the Democracy Landscape, applied non-partisanly and symmetrically, including to liberal democracies
- **Blog and retrospectives** — analysis connecting DOD's own eight-plus years of discussion to what's happening in the wider reform space now

## Links

- Website: [designingopendemocracy.com](https://www.designingopendemocracy.com)
- [Telegram](https://t.me/joinchat/HNk_UBX8A7jBPJPbAZU5Zg) — **main point of contact**; day-to-day discussion and coordination
- [Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/) and [Humanitix](https://events.humanitix.com/host/designing-open-democracy) — Melbourne in-person events
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqIo0VC_zHyPjzNKIafGJpg/featured) — recorded meetups and talks
- [Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/designing-open-democracy/id1492656241)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/DesigningOpenDemocracy.github.io) — this site's source, open to pull requests

## See also

- [About](../about.md) — DOD's own fuller self-description
- [Community](../community/community.md) — how to get involved
- [Philosophy](../philosophy/index.md) — open discussion space, including disagreement with DOD's own framework
- [Accountability Framework](../projects/accountability-framework/index.md)
- [Meta-Organisation](../concepts/meta-organisation.md)
- [Occupy to Plurality: what the 2010s civic-tech wave built, and where it stalled](../blog/posts/2026-08-07-civic-tech-wave-2010s.md)