Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

As the AIEP project concludes its first pilot in San Francisco, it offers more than a new AI tool for navigating IEPs. It shows what becomes possible when families, educators, designers, and researchers co-design technology from the ground up. Through a free, open-source tool, a civic AI learning course, a community-centered playbook, and academic research, this work demonstrates a practical model for public-purpose AI rooted in lived experience, shared learning, and accountability. What began as support for parents has grown into a blueprint for building AI with communities, not just for them.

Leaders increasingly believe public engagement matters, but lack the practical know-how to do it well. Beth Simone Noveck and Dane Gambrell examine how institutions use AI and collective intelligence to engage the public at scale. Across countries and levels of government, engagement can move from performative to consequential when institutions build the capacity to design it well. That work now comes together in a new free course, Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era, created by InnovateUS, The GovLab, and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, to help public professionals turn these lessons into practice.

This week on Reboot Democracy, Cassandra Madison argues that governments cannot responsibly adopt new tools without safe, shared spaces to test them before procurement locks in risk. Dhruv Kamlesh Kumar shows how that principle worked in practice on the AIEP project, where families shaped a special education tool by defining what information matters, how privacy is protected, and how meaning is preserved across languages. Beth Simone Noveck reports from Boston, drawing on lessons from Spain to help launch a citizen-enabled permitting overhaul. These efforts stand in contrast to recent failures, from New York City shutting down a misleading chatbot to immigration surveillance systems and exposed children’s chat records that show how weak governance turns tools into harm.