Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven’t been posting the full text on the blog because they’re a bit long, but here are links.

Part 1 is about the Japanese digital democracy party, Team Mirai.

Part 2 is about the Swiss Public AI model, Apertus.

Part 3 is about the civic technologists of Open Knowledge Brazil.

And the new one, Part 4, is about civic AI in Scotland.

Tags: AI, democracy, LLM, Rewiring Democracy

Posted on September 1, 2026 at 5:59 AM • 4 Comments

Comments

KC • September 1, 2026 10:20 AM

re: CrownShy – the Scottish civic tech co

So super neat. Enjoying exploring the co’s origins and new developments.

From what I’m gathering, the company designs open-source digital infra to help govs around the world involve citizens in democratic policy making. They created Comhairle, an integrator of tools such as Polis, Jitsi, T3C. They’re also integrating AI into a learning assistant and elicitation bot.

Recently, they shared a pilot study at a UCL workshop on AI in urban planning. Cool illustrations!

Also going to bookmark Zooniverse. A ton of neat things there.

Clive Robinson • September 1, 2026 11:36 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Beware of AI usage by government agencies in the UK.

They are already being used to attack the disabled and disadvantaged and will almost certainly lead to premature deaths in a number of ways.

In effect this is going to turn out to be “Robo-Debt” and worse on steroids and the harm to society will be immense.

I can give some further details but much of it is being kept secret / under cover, but information is leaking out.

One aspect is the systems are being built internally by people who basically have no experience of doing such things.

Whilst not quite “vibe coding” of the worst form, I’m sure you can see the problems with this.

Especially when their is a great mismatch between “stated aims” and “actual objectives”.

Ferentarius • September 1, 2026 1:44 PM

Re: part 3: “In a total transformation of the open source economy, Microsoft now charges open source developers to access the models trained on their labor.”

To witness the devouring of open source by its own benefactors is to watch the universe confess its indifference. We toil in the illusion of freedom, only to discover that every gesture of creation is a prelude to our own dispossession. Microsoft is not a company; it is a reminder that even generosity is mortal, and every gift becomes a debt when the world tires of innocence.

ordered_liberty • September 1, 2026 8:19 PM

@Clive

I beware everything the government does. It is not on “the peoples’ side”. It is a self-sustaining system that is on its own side, constrained only by imperfectly (and after-the-fact) enforced constitutional dogma. An analogue version of AI, if you will.

I can imagine a future in which the practice of voluntarily applying for means-tested benefits is replaced with AI-powered stimulus to a machine-identified subset of the population. Sounds super efficient, but in reality is prone to all sorts of malevolence.

Although it is no longer socially acceptable to say so, there is no agreement about either what a disability is (physical only, or mental too?; partial or complete?) or what role the state should play in paying the way for the disabled.

On the one hand, social programs prevent poverty. On the other hand, they also prevent those who benefit from them from accumulating any private property (lest they lose their eligibility) and that effectively institutionalizes them in much the same way they would be institutionalized were they in an open-air prison.

The other thing one cannot say for fear of being branded socially unacceptable is that every system worries about malingering. So there is an endless stream of data which attempts to catch cheaters. Imagine what one could do with AI to feed an algorithm designed to decide that someone is not really disabled enough to qualify for further benefits. And maybe even make them pay back what was already given to them — hence RoboDebt, as you say.

Schneier on Security

Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

Comments

Leave a comment Cancel reply