Who's Strengthening Our Democracies - A List of Pro-Democracy Organisations, and Projects

I'd like to find others working in on pro-democracy, pro-sense-making, pro-flourishing: Who's Strengthening Our Democracies - and How Do We Join Forces?

Specifically I'm interested in planetary-billions scale sense making, how we construct a share mental model / shared understanding of the world, and how data, software modeling, simulations, serious games, and using that to power journalism, policy making, LLMs, etc. can achieve a long-term collective flourishing.

This is a messy list of organisations, projects, and people that I think are doing interesting work in this space. It is very much a work in progress and I would love suggestions for additions to it.

Digital Government

• MetaGov.org

• https://www.interweavegov.com/ - Thanks Anne Lee Steele

• National Strategy Project

  • Catherine Day

• https://stateofbritain.uk/

  • Jack Aspinall

• Open Knowledge Foundation https://okfn.org/

  • https://ckan.org/

Fact Checking

• https://fullfact.org/

• https://crown-shy.com/

  CrownShy provides the socio-technical expertise to renew organizations and assist groups in their pursuit of self-governance in situations ranging from social movements to peacebuilding, policy making, design & planning for environmental restoration & urban development, journalism, indigenous sovereignty, and the functioning of democratic systems.

• https://demos.co.uk/collaborative-democracy-network/

Funder

• https://nlnet.nl/thema/NGI0CommonsFund.html
• https://carnegieuk.org/
• https://aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/collective-flourishing

Academia

• https://v-dem.net/about/v-dem-institute/

• https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/ Blavatnik School of Government

  Our vision at the Blavatnik School of Government is of a world better led, better served and better governed, and our mission is to inspire and support better government and public policy around the world. Over the course of 2024 more countries have had elections and more people have participated in those elections than any other year in history. I am delighted that alumni of the School have stood as candidates and been elected to represent their countries and communities. While each election is different, at their core are questions of outcomes and competence, and whether the government is able to deliver what people want and need.

• https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x5qbw/doctor-adam-procter

Conferences, organisations, and networks

• Newspeak House https://newspeak.house/
• The Centre for Public Data https://www.centreforpublicdata.org/
• The Conduit https://www.theconduit.org/
• Anthropy-UK https://www.linkedin.com/company/anthropy-uk/
  • https://www.edenproject.com/visit/whats-on/anthropy-2026-inspiring-a-better-britain

Serious games

• https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x5qbw/doctor-adam-procter

• Some list of serious games, non-games, lists of lists, books.

TODO: merge with this page.

• serious games https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/2025/12/09/serious-games-to-support-organisation-design/

Also some interest in digital twins but I've not seen any output yet:

Announcement that Digital Twins are on the list of experimental policy design methods: https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/2022/05/18/launching-our-experimental-policy-design-methods/

• great article on product design & development: https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/2022/12/06/using-prototypes-to-test-new-policy-ideas/
• https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/2023/08/08/a-creative-technologist-working-in-policy-one-year-in/?_rt=NzB8N3x3b3JsZCB3ZSB3YW50fDE3Mjg2MzQ1MjE&_rt_nonce=a2a57e9992

Update: I now understand that getting the funding to make these as part of a project is very hard. The project's objectives often need to pivot and change quickly / regularly.

Journalists

This list is totally incomplete, but here are some journalists who I think are doing interesting work in this space:

• Zeynep Tufekci
  • Zeynep Tufekci's article - I Was Wrong About Why Protests Work makes me think of this video from Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano on How to Change People's Minds, where she says that protests rarely change others minds, but they have a big impact on the participants. Actually Tufekci's perspective now makes Lubrano's work make more sense to me.

Tools

Non-profit

• https://www.kialo-edu.com/ - similar to what I was first building in 2011 called Constructive Discussion, which came from Addis with Miltos and Chris.

• https://www.gapminder.org/

For profit

• https://www.focusgames.com/
• Game-based learning
• Choose from a range of ready-made games, or let us develop one just for you.

Data

• https://www.ourworldindata.org/

• https://www.gapminder.org/

• https://fullfact.org/

• https://www.interweavegov.com/

• https://whoownsengland.org

• https://opensourcepolitics.eu/

• "A vision for the democracy data space, Sept 2025, Open Source Politics"

• List of specialists in open data

• List of organisations using CKAN for publishing data

• TidyTuesday

Uncategorised

ChatGPT just "autocompleted" these in my code editor for me:

• https://www.povertyactionlab.org/
• https://www.centreformacroeconomics.ac.uk/
• https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/
• https://www.oxfordinsights.com/
• https://www.oxfordenergy.org/

Say Hello!

Say hello if you're interested in our collective flourishing.