As cities worldwide grapple with increasing civic participation amid growing demands for more inclusive governance, digital democracy platforms are emerging as powerful tools to reshape how communities make decisions together. These innovative platforms are breaking down barriers to participation, enabling citizens to contribute ideas, vote on priorities, and co-create solutions with their governments and organisations. From participatory budgeting to large-scale consensus building, here are five distinct approaches transforming how digital democracy works in practice.
1. Decidim
Decidim is a comprehensive free and open-source platform designed to help citizens, organisations, and public institutions self-organise democratically at every scale. The platform offers a robust suite of tools including strategic planning, participatory processes, citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, and networked communication. Built with transparency and security at its core, Decidim has enabled cities like Barcelona to co-produce strategic city plans with thousands of citizen participants. With customisable workflows that can be tailored to different governance contexts, Decidim empowers organisations to mould the platform to their needs rather than the reverse.
2. adhocracy+
Developed by the non-profit Liquid Democracy organisation and available free of charge, adhocracy+ makes digital participation accessible without requiring technical expertise or installation. The platform currently supports around 400 organisations across 2,400 participation projects with 28,000 active users worldwide. adhocracy+ emphasises simplicity and user-friendliness, offering communities a straightforward way to launch participation initiatives directly. The platform is financed by donations and backed by a global community committed to making digital democracy available to all, regardless of resources.
3. Go Vocal
Go Vocal is a cloud-based digital engagement platform that facilitates two-way communication between cities and their citizens by matching urban challenges with residents based on their expertise and interests. Since its founding in 2015, the platform has grown to serve over 500 governments and organisations worldwide while empowering more than 1 million community members. Citizens can post proposals, collaborate with others to develop them, and vote to set priorities. The platform combines idea generation with participatory decision-making, making it a versatile tool for various engagement contexts.
4. Consul Democracy
Consul Democracy is an open-source software used by more than 250 cities and organisations globally to enable open, transparent, and democratic governance. The platform offers robust tools for citizen debate, proposal gathering, collective voting, participatory budgeting, and collaborative law-drafting. Its comprehensive feature set supports entire governance workflows, from gathering input to implementation. Consul Democracy is free to use and modify, supported by international partners including the United Nations Development Programme, and offers free instances to limited-resource organisations to ensure accessibility.
5. Polis
Polis is an innovative open-source conversation platform that uses machine learning to identify consensus and elevate ideas that can drive better decision-making. Rather than traditional voting, Polis gathers citizen opinions through an algorithm designed to surface areas of agreement even within diverse groups. The platform has gained prominence in Taiwan's vTaiwan initiative, which uses Polis for large-scale legislative deliberation, and has been employed in contexts ranging from city governance to national climate assemblies. Polis excels at finding common ground on controversial topics where traditional polling might obscure shared values.
These five platforms demonstrate that digital democracy takes many forms, each offering unique strengths for different governance contexts. Whether prioritising accessibility, comprehensive features, consensus-building, or customisation, these tools are enabling communities to move beyond passive consultation toward genuine co-creation and shared decision-making. As cities and organisations increasingly recognise the need for more inclusive participation, these platforms provide pathways to strengthen democratic engagement and build more responsive, accountable governance systems.
For more programmes and policies related to digital governance visit our use.topic webpage on Digital Democracy.