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Ready to start learning? Sign up for the free, self-paced course at: https://innovate-us.org/course/democratic-engagement-for-ai-era/
In 2024, Joca, a four-year-old golden retriever, died on a scorching Brazilian tarmac after an airline’s tragic mistake. The nation’s outrage could have remained another trending hashtag. Instead, Fernando, a young man in São Paulo, submitted a proposal for “Joca’s Law” through the Brazilian Senate’s e-Citizenship portal.
Thousands of Brazilians endorsed the idea. Lawmakers held hearings and introduced the first comprehensive law for animal transport safety.
Joca’s Law shows what's possible when institutions create clear channels for people’s ideas to be heard, supported, and acted on.
Technology’s value depends on the design of the participatory process surrounding it.
Yet, too few institutions have such channels, and those that solicit public input often struggle to make sense of it and translate it into action. And few public servants have had the opportunity to learn how to design effective engagement, whether online or in person.
Institutions can use artificial intelligence to engage more people and make sense of more public input. However, the technology’s value depends on the design of the participatory process surrounding it.
A New Course for Public Servants
To help more institutions design effective public engagement, the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, The GovLab, and InnovateUS have developed a free, online, self-paced course on Designing Democratic Engagement with AI: Practical Strategies for Public Participation.
Delivered through short, accessible videos, the one-hour course focuses on concrete design choices, such as whom to engage, what to ask, and how to use public input in decision-making. Throughout, it shows how public professionals can use artificial intelligence to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of running a public engagement while improving accessibility, inclusion, and insight, without replacing human judgment.
Presented by Professor Danielle Allen and Professor Beth Noveck along with leading global engagement practitioners, the course features 42 examples of engagement in practice from 20 nations. The course draws upon the lessons from our fall workshop series and the expertise of a design and advisory board of 50+ global experts on public engagement.
Learners also get access to the Public Engagement Coach, a new AI-powered coaching tool we are developing to provide ongoing advice and support as public servants put what they learn into practice.
Why a Course on Designing Democratic Engagement with AI?
When well-designed, engagement improves both the legitimacy and effectiveness of decision-making.
For institutions, more and better engagement surfaces expertise, experience, and lived experience that improve decision-making. For leaders, public input enhances the legitimacy and effectiveness of actions and shows communities that they are being heard. And for the public, it creates a genuine opportunity to shape the decisions that affect our lives.
Public institutions worldwide are experimenting with powerful new AI tools to make public engagement more scalable and easier to manage.
While many institutions want to engage, the challenge is how to do so well considering the limited time, budgets, and staffing that many institutions face.
At the same time, public institutions worldwide are experimenting with powerful new AI tools to make public engagement more scalable and easier to manage.
After the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the State of California co-designed a recovery plan with affected communities, using AI to synthesize 1,300 comments from over 3,000 residents into 19 policy options. Participants debated and prioritized these into five recovery priorities – from undergrounding power lines to strengthening communication networks – which decision-makers are now acting on.
In Mexico, the Supreme Court organized roundtable discussions with thousands of residents nationwide to surface ideas to make the justice system more accountable, effective, and responsive to communities’ needs. Staff used generative AI to detect emerging issues and surface less visible viewpoints, helping center voices long unheard by the justice system.
Participants in Querétaro, Mexico, collaborate at the first of 14 national forums convened in 2024 to gather public ideas for improving the country’s security and justice systems.
The City of Hamburg, Germany, developed a custom Digital Participation System that turns community comments into actionable insights. Residents submit ideas and feedback on urban planning projects through maps and discussion tools. The platform’s AI tools help cluster comments, distinguish problems from proposals, and generate summaries, turning input that once overwhelmed staff into something they can analyze and act on in real time.
In the course, public servants turned to AI not only to manage engagement, but to make it more meaningful and impactful.
These examples show how public servants can use AI to analyze contributions, identify overlooked perspectives, and turn large volumes of public input into useful insights. They also demonstrate that technology is only part of the solution: its value depends on the participatory process surrounding it.
In each case, institutions paired AI tools with a deliberate plan that defined whom to reach, what to ask, and how to use the input, transforming their ability to listen to, learn from, and govern with communities. These are just a few of the examples you'll learn about in the course, where public servants turned to AI not only to manage engagement, but to make it more meaningful and impactful.
Joca's law began with one person turning outrage into a proposal. But what made that proposal matter was a system designed to receive, surface, and act on what people had to say. This course can help public servants build the channels through which the next good idea can move an institution to act.
Ready to start learning? Sign up for the free, self-paced course at: https://innovate-us.org/course/democratic-engagement-for-ai-era/
For additional reading, browse our related blogs:
Doing Democracy with AI — the broader case for why AI-enabled engagement matters now
Designing Democratic Engagement: Three Hard Choices — the design tradeoffs the course itself teaches practitioners to navigate
AI & Democratic Engagement: Feedback from Our Advisory Board — what the 50+ experts behind this course told us as they shaped it