Collaborate with us

Collaboration is key to success and innovation - to grow the global deliberative wave, we are always on the lookout to connect with likeminded people and organisations who want the same thing as us:

Broadening who has power and enhancing how we make decisions together.

Since DemocracyNext launched in 2022, we have collaborated with over 30 public authorities at various levels of government, universities, museums, and companies, where there is a commitment to establishing more than one-off citizens’ assemblies as new institutions.

DemNext is not a practitioner organisation that delivers or facilitates assemblies: we are a research and action institute dedicated to scaling three powerful democratic practices - sortition, deliberation, and rotation.

We provide leaders who want to reinvigorate democracy with cutting-edge networks, rigorous research, and practical advice to learn about, establish, and institutionalise these democratic innovations. We want citizens’ assemblies to be sustainable and for more people in more places to know how to do this, and for the stories of the impact of assemblies to be shared.

Please get in touch with Claudia Chwalisz if your research aligns with DemNext’s focus and you’d like to explore a fellowship or other form of research collaboration.

Do you have feedback on any of our resources? Let us know!

Our research is grounded in rigorous academic approaches and is action-oriented in its outputs and recommendations. The type of research projects we undertake tend to be international and comparative in nature, drawing on practice to distill learning for others. We always work in a collaborative process with a wider interdisciplinary feedback group before publishing any of our papers. These tend to be written in a more accessible style than academic journal articles.

Most of our research is done in-house, often with our research fellows who tend to be embedded at a university either as PhD students, postdocs, or professors. Sometimes we partner with universities or other research organisations on jointly published papers. We also sometimes commission external researchers when we lack the expertise and contextual understanding to carry out research on questions that are relevant to our mission and goals.

In addition to research papers, we also create the tools, guides, and resources needed to help people and organisations implement deliberative processes using sortition, whilst experimenting with and researching innovations that improve quality, enhance legitimacy, and accelerate their spread.

Would you like to collaborate with DemNext on an initiative on the ground?

Reach out to Claudia Chwalisz and Lucy Reid.

We often work in contexts where an organisation is running their first citizens' assembly where it’s typical that there is a lack of know-how in the administration and local civil society organisations about how to do this. DemNext builds up local capacity in the administration and civil society to know how to design and facilitate a high-quality assembly. As part of this, we typically:

  • Provide access to learning materials (video tutorials and summary handouts) about the key aspects of designing and facilitating a citizens’ assembly.
  • Support the commissioning body's leadership in setting out the wording of the question (typically necessitates 4-5 calls, and collaborative work on a written document).
  • Support the commissioner in developing the procurement document that outlines the roles and responsibilities of the facilitation organisation.
  • Lead and facilitate a 2-3 day assembly design workshop with key officials and the facilitation team in order to co-design the assembly.
  • Provide ongoing advice during the design and implementation of the assembly.
  • Support the organisers in drafting the content of the invitation letter.
  • With a trusted practitioner partner, provides a 2-3 day training for facilitating citizens’ assemblies.
  • Helps to establish a connection with a local university or academic team that could lead on independent evaluation.
  • Lead and facilitate an institutionalisation workshop after the citizens’ assembly, where the team can reflect on the first assembly and on the steps needed in that specific context to establish it as a new institution going forward (the legal steps needed, where support within the administration will be situated, what will be the ongoing relationship with elected officials, what is the budget, etc.)

As part of our belief in capacity building, we intentionally help build connections to the wider national and international network of people in the field to ensure we are no longer needed once the first assembly has been completed.

Do you have a story to share? Get in touch with Ruba Asfahani!

We work to mainstream and share the impact of citizens’ assemblies. We do this by telling the stories of those involved at all levels of an assembly – from members to facilitators, government officials to evaluators. At DemNext, we believe it’s a vital part of truly understanding the power of a citizens’ assembly.

On our channels - LinkedIn, Substack, YouTube and Spotify - you will find interviews, webinar recordings and papers, which offer deep insight from the team, as well as our collaborators and friends who are supporting the deliberative wave movement.

We engage in creative storytelling and advocacy that inspires people to learn about and champion another democratic future, powered by real stories from around the world.

Please get in touch with Claudia Chwalisz and Sammy McKinney if you’d like to explore collaboration!

DemNext continues to experiment with how to incorporate technology to enhance the quality of deliberation, increase the inclusiveness and transparency of an assembly, and strengthen the link to a wider public with outputs grounded in voice.

From 2023-2025, we collaborated with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication via our Tech-Enhanced Citizens' Assemblies Pop-Up Lab.

In September 2025, we launched the Deliberation & Technology (DelibTech) Network with the AI & Democracy Foundation. Technological advances are opening up an exciting array of possibilities for democracy. There is also growing interest amongst technologists to build tools and applications that can enhance deliberation. And there are increasing numbers of practitioners who are using (or would like to use) more AI-powered and other technologies during citizens’ assemblies. We believe there is power and value in bridging these two, sometimes disparate, worlds, and bringing them together.

We are open to testing out new technologies that we believe are enhancing people’s deliberative muscles in our assembly projects, and are continuing to do research on related questions.