Choosing the right digital participation platform is one of the toughest challenges for governments and civic groups when designing a public engagement. With dozens of tools on the market, it’s not always clear which one fits your needs or how to use it well.

The new Guide to Digital Participation Platforms, developed by participatory democracy hub People Powered, offers a much-needed compass. It gives governments, civil society organizations, and civic technologists practical guidance on how to assess their needs, compare options, and select a platform that matches their purpose, resources, and capacity.

What is the Guide to Digital Participation?

The guide helps those who design or host public engagement projects better understand what digital participation platforms are, when to use them, how to select among available tools, and how to set up and run engagement processes that effectively use the public’s input. 

The guide is part of a larger set of resources that includes a catalog of digital engagement platforms, case studies of impactful projects, and materials for further reading. It is an updated version of People Powered’s previous guidance, published in 2022, including a new chapter dedicated to the opportunities and challenges of integrating artificial intelligence into participatory processes.

What Should It Be Used For?

The guide’s greatest value is as a tool for selecting the “right” platform. Choosing a platform is never a one-size-fits-all decision, and the guide draws on case studies and interviews with platform providers and users to help readers see what works in different contexts. Rather than merely listing the available tools (of which there are many), the guide and its accompanying resources describe how institutions can pick the right tool for the job based on practical considerations such as accessibility, data security, cost, scalability, feature set, and more. 

It adds to the existing knowledge base about how institutions can effectively co-design and collaborate with communities, including resources such as Nesta’s guides on collective intelligence design, The GovLab’s Open Policymaking, Crowdlaw playbooks, and collective intelligence case studies, and the Civic Tech Field Guide, while adding new learnings from a set of recent examples and case studies. 

Problem-solvers who want to get the most out of their engagement with communities should consider using People Powered’s platform selection guide together with a project design guide, like the collective intelligence checklist developed by The GovLab and Nesta.

The checklist outlines nine key questions that project organizers should be able to answer to use public engagement effectively, regardless of the platforms or methods used. When used alongside the People Powered guide, the checklist provides a practical mechanism for translating both resources’ recommendations into a concrete plan of action. 

AI and the Future of Participation

The guide also touches on one of the thorniest topics in civic tech today: the intersection of artificial intelligence and democratic participation. It outlines the societal risks, including the environmental costs of large-scale AI models, data privacy concerns, bias in training data, and the lack of transparency and public input in how these models are governed. These are critical conversations, but they represent only one part of the puzzle. 

What public institutions need next are more insights into the practical challenges of using AI in participation projects. While there are an ever-expanding number of AI-powered moderation, summarization, and deliberation tools, what barriers do public servants encounter using these tools in practice? What new needs do these tools create for technical infrastructure, staff training, procurement, and ethical review, and are public institutions equipped to meet them? 

As governments and civic groups experiment with AI to scale engagement–whether through automated translations, clustering thousands of public comments, or generating policy briefs–we need to study not only what becomes more efficient, but what becomes more complex. 

Future studies could go further in mapping the organizational, cultural, and leadership capacities required to deploy AI responsibly in democratic processes.

Conclusion

The updated Guide to Digital Participation Platforms shows how much is at stake in the choices governments and civic groups make about engagement. A well-matched platform can strengthen trust and influence decisions, while a poor fit risks shallow consultation and frustration. By laying out how to align tools with purpose and capacity, People Powered provides a roadmap for more meaningful participation.

Looking ahead, the continued proliferation of AI-powered engagement tools will only sharpen these choices. As new tools emerge to translate, cluster, and analyze public input, the question will be less about whether governments adopt them and more about how ready they are to use them well. Building the skills, infrastructure, and leadership to manage this next wave of digital participation will determine whether technology deepens democracy or leaves public trust further behind.

To learn more about picking the right platform, join Reboot Democracy and InnovateUS on September 24 at 3pm ET for a workshop on Different AI Horses for Different Courses: Matching Tools to Purpose led by Greta Ríos and Nikhil Kumar of People Powered. 

To learn more about The GovLab’s collective intelligence checklist, join us on September 30 at 3pm EDT for a workshop on Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era. 

Register for both workshops at: https://innovate-us.org/workshops