Chapter 1
Introduction
We live in a critical time for democracy around the world.
Over the last few decades, a narrative of inevitable, gradual progress towards a more democratic world has become first strained, and then just incompatible with the observable facts. As the 2025 V-Dem Democracy report said, we are seeing "weakening of democracy in some established liberal democracies, breakdown of democracy in countries that were democratic for most of the 21st century, as well as deepening of autocracy in already autocratic states". We need to be realists about the current situation, without being fatalistic. That same V-Dem report also points out that autocracy isn't a one-way train, that there are countries around the world bucking the trend, either gradually or dramatically. There remains work to do everywhere, and every small win makes a difference.
A key question for both technologists and pro-democracy actors is how technology fits into this picture, when (in different forms) it sits on both sides of the fight. We talk about what we do as pro-democracy tech because we believe that technology can strengthen and defend democracy — but also because we recognise that there is clearly such a thing as "anti-democracy tech". Modern autocracies are not just a resurgence of old ideas, but are interconnected movements that make significant use of digital technology in how they operate at home, and in attacks on democracies elsewhere. Technology provides new methods of democratic participation, deliberation and collaboration. It also creates new forms of oppression, control, and warfare. Part of winning the big fight is making sure we properly understand, utilise and/or resist these different approaches to technology.
Mark Carney identifies the key question of this period as being the balance between strategic autonomy and the efficiency gains of interdependence. How do we reduce the risk of our global interdependence being weaponised against us, without creating a brittle and poorer world where everyone is duplicating capacities instead of collaborating and building on each other's work?
This is a question to which the pro-democracy civic tech movement is well placed to contribute. Around the world there is a huge amount of reliance on technology provided by tech giants, but also strong practical traditions of open source work and collaboration across borders. We run TICTeC because we believe that in order to have the most impact, we are necessarily interconnected. There is value in building and learning from each other's work, both practically in terms of code and frameworks, but also in sharing ideas, inspiration, and ways to have a bigger impact in changing landscapes.
Our goal with this report is to explore different approaches to using technology in the service of democracy, and present practical guidance on making the most of the tools available. New AI technologies create potentially interesting opportunities for pro-democracy tech, while at the same time contributing to shifts in the landscape that require adaptation in themselves. We draw out examples from projects that exist and are doing good work, as well as where changing circumstances introduce new challenges to our collective work.
For the last 20 years mySociety has been one of the world's leading civic tech organisations, and for the last 10 years we have run the TICTeC (The Impacts of Civic Technology) conference and programme. From our base in the UK, running services used by millions of people, we work at the cutting edge of using technology to help people participate in decisions that make an impact in their lives.
We are part of a wider community of people working to create pro-democracy technology in different societies and contexts. We actively work to bring this community together through our TICTeC conference and networks. Our convening work helps people share code, patterns, and inspiration.
We believe that having an anchor in the global perspective helps civic tech organisations fight their local battles. It brings back tools and ideas to use at home, and reframes what can be an isolated experience chipping away at big problems with connections to a global community doing the same things.
In the last few years, we've been exploring the idea of ‘pro-democracy tech' as a way to define and bring together different areas of global civic tech, and connect clearly with the need to build better connections between technologists and the wider pro-democracy movement.
This report is an extension of that work, building on the presentation and conversations we've been having at TICTeC and with the wider community on what the current challenges are, and the wide range of approaches that are being explored.
Pro-democracy tech describes digital tools aimed at realising and defending democratic values.
A key motivation of this approach is that authoritarianism is not standing still, and is learning how to use technology to extend its surveillance and control over people. Democracy's reaction to this needs to be not to reject technology, but to use it to evolve and compete. Democracy needs to be fast, effective and popular, while not conceding that the only way to do this is by becoming more centralised and authoritarian itself.
Within this, there are two key activities:
- Defensive democratic tech – defending the open society: anti-corruption, anti-misinformation, etc.
- Constructive democratic tech – empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity: participation and deliberation, community tools, civic response tech.
These are interconnected, and not hard divides. Defensive approaches safeguard the openness which democracy needs to function, while constructive approaches build the capacity of the engine of democratic progress.
There are tools and approaches that apply to both. Access to Information laws are both vital anti-corruption tools, and part of capacity building through lowering costs of accessing information. Democratic transparency organisations (parliamentary monitoring and similar) are both about increasing anti-corruption surveillance, and transforming the capacity and connections of democratic institutions.
Where they differ is in their approaches to new technological tools. Defensive democratic tech is in an arms war with autocrats. We have to keep moving and innovating to stay in place. It is reactive against a well-financed opponent, and needs to understand how to bend tools (often developed by those with deep pockets and their own motives) to democratic purposes.
Constructive democratic tech is less of a zero-sum game. Just as there are technological approaches that make authoritarianism much more effective, there are approaches that make democracy much more effective. Here the enemy is less tangible but omnipresent: inertia, low expectations, and a belief that things can't be better. The goal of this approach is developing civic capacity, where the extraordinary capacity and cognitive diversity in a democracy are fully enabled to work together to solve the big problems of the age.
Pro-democracy tech is a big umbrella covering many different kinds of projects, but we think it is important to have conversations bridging these areas, showing how different ideas fit into the big picture, and where practical tools and skills that are common across different approaches can be supported and encouraged.
This report is intended as a practical document for current civic tech practitioners, pro-democracy organisations interested in making more use of tech, and funders interested in the intersection of tech and democracy.
This report covers a lot of ground: it's split into four thematic areas sections with chapter listings below to help you decide which areas are most relevant to your work.
We want this report to be a practical jumping-off point for those seeking to understand more about this space. To learn more, explore the TICTeC Knowledge Hub which contains 10 years of TICTeC talks and in-depth material.
These sections show how pro-democracy tech has been operationalised, and give examples of practical approaches to bridging technologists with people working in deliberative democracy and anti-corruption.
This section will be of most interest to people trying to understand how to connect the wider group of people doing pro-democracy work (in either democratic defence or democratic innovation) with the use of technology.
The arms race: approaches to defensive pro-democratic tech. Defensive pro-democratic tech is often in an arms race. New technology and innovation is required to keep pace, but often these same approaches are useful to those who seek to undermine democratic values. Getting ahead requires efficiencies in use of new technologies: building infrastructure, tools, and approaches that can empower many different actors at once. But at the same time, this creates new trade-offs and funding challenges in dependence on shared infrastructure. This chapter discusses obstacles and approaches to cybersecurity and anti-corruption approaches to defensive tech.
The new wave: Constructive democratic tech: technology can be used to support new forms of democracy, but this needs careful alignment between technology choices and the values the democratic innovation puts emphasis on. This chapter explores how tech approaches to deliberative democracy have adapted to what its practitioners value, providing a model for thinking about how technology can support different kinds of democratic approaches.
This section covers what we've learned convening communities of practice around two different areas: Access to Information/Freedom of Information and parliamentary monitoring/democratic transparency. As well as convening the broad civic tech community through the TICTeC conference, we also wanted to experiment more with how we could convene and support projects working in similar areas across the world. We took a different approach for each community, looking for where we could best add unique value (especially from the technology side), and constructively overlap with other networks.
These chapters will be of most interest to people working/interested in Access to Information or parliamentary monitoring, but also those who are interested in different approaches to convening and sharing learning.
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Access to Information as democratic infrastructure: in this chapter, Access to Information is reframed from an individual legal right into essential democratic infrastructure needed to make power legible and accountable in increasingly automated, outsourced, and opaque systems. This is supported by technical infrastructure tools like Alaveteli, collective and journalistic practice, and evolving approaches to measurement of performance and effectiveness.
Supporting global democratic transparency: in this chapter, we explore how we can support global democratic transparency by expanding beyond traditional parliamentary monitoring to a wider set of "democratic transparency projects". We believe that a focus on transferable technical innovation (including AI) fills a gap that helps projects adopt new technologies, while managing risks in an era of democratic backsliding.
Civic tech projects need to balance when they need to be flexible (adapting to local contexts and the distribution channels that exist), and when they need to try to change that context: investing and laying down infrastructure that makes their (and others) work easier.
This section explores changing methods of distribution, how projects can use intermediaries to reach their audience, the role of foundational digital infrastructure in shaping what's possible, and how democratic actors should be seeking to influence and build that infrastructure.
Digital infrastructure: Foundations for democratic futures: Civic tech is often about building infrastructure, but rarely described in those terms. This chapter explores overlaps and connections between existing work and ideas of digital public infrastructure. Digital infrastructure has the capacity to either strengthen or erode democracy depending on its design, governance, and funding. As such, pro-democracy actors must deliberately build and sustain "democratic" infrastructure, while making a better case for its long-term impact.
Distributing democracy: Having impact through reaching mass audiences: in this chapter, we explore why scaling civic tech impact now requires strategies beyond "build a great website"— adapting to the decline of the open web and choosing deliberate ways to reach mass audiences through platforms, influencers, chatbots/AI, or alternative channels like email and print.
This is an obvious point, but successful pro-democratic technology involves making good choices in how to use technology effectively. These chapters explore frameworks and examples of approaches to AI technologies, as well as other considerations in making effective and sustainable technology choices.
Evaluating and understanding AI: in this chapter, we explore what modern AI (especially LLMs) can and can't do, when hype and black-box risks mean we should adopt it cautiously, and how to decide and evaluate when AI is a good fit. We propose a practical question framework, and disciplined model testing ("evals"), while weighing open vs closed models and long-term sustainability.
Sustainable tech: balancing ease of development with user experience: in this chapter, we explore the tension between the benefits of out-of-the-box solutions for civic tech teams, with the device constraints of potential users. We explore how pro-democracy tech teams can make sustainable technology choices under tight constraints; designing for low-spec users, selectively using performance/security-focused languages, and exploring low-cost approaches to LLMs.