Initiative

Polity Cooperative

Building democratic infrastructure for the 21st century: standing panels, structured sensemaking, and member-governed data so decisions reflect informed public judgement, not the loudest voices.

The Challenge

Participation without power

Public engagement is often expensive, episodic, and unrepresentative, producing input that is easy to ignore and hard to translate into legitimate decisions. At the same time, complex challenges like housing affordability, climate adaptation, AI governance, education, and healthcare require deliberation on trade-offs, not just sentiment.

A second layer of the challenge is data. Communities generate valuable civic insight through participation, but too often the rules are opaque, value is extracted, and benefits do not flow back to the people whose knowledge made the process possible. This reinforces unequal power dynamics and weakens trust.

The Response

A cooperative platform for participatory governance

Polity Cooperative is a member-owned platform for collective decision-making and public engagement, built on proven digital democracy foundations that originated with Ethelo. Polity is designed to make participation meaningful, repeatable, and accountable by supporting clear decision workflows, representative recruitment, and governance structures that protect community agency.

Polity enables partners to:

Build standing, representative panels that reflect the diversity of a population and can be renewed over time
Support structured dialogue and sensemaking that helps people learn, deliberate, and converge on usable recommendations
Establish ethical data governance that clarifies consent, privacy, value creation, and benefit-sharing
Lower the barrier to adoption through templates and guided set-up for common decision types (policy options, budgeting, grantmaking, planning)

Guiding Principles

What grounds the work

Power-aware participation: engagement is designed to shift influence toward communities, not merely collect feedback.
Representation and inclusion: recruitment and facilitation are built to include quieter voices, reduce bias, and improve legitimacy.
Data sovereignty and consent: communities and Indigenous partners and rightsholders have the right to govern how participation data is collected, used, shared, and monetized.
Transparency with safeguards: decisions and methods are explainable, while participant safety and privacy are protected.
Participation as real work: civic contribution is treated with dignity, including compensation where appropriate and feasible.
Learning orientation: every engagement is treated as an iteration, with feedback loops that improve future practice.

Key Tensions

Edges we're navigating

Scale vs depth: faster reach can erode deliberation quality, yet deep deliberation can be resource-intensive.
Transparency vs safety: openness builds accountability, but privacy and anonymity can be essential for participation.
Incentives vs commodification: compensating participation strengthens legitimacy, but monetization must not undermine trust.
Community agency vs institutional constraints: participatory outcomes only matter if decision-makers pre-commit to how recommendations will be used.

What We're Learning

Emerging insights

Standing panels can become durable civic infrastructure that reduces the cost and friction of repeated engagement, while improving representativeness over one-off consultations. When linked across domains, panels can help public institutions learn over time and carry insight from one policy cycle to the next.

We are also learning that participation is an implementation strategy. When people have genuinely weighed trade-offs and co-authored recommendations, decisions tend to carry stronger social licence, face fewer downstream barriers, and invite more constructive accountability.

Our Role

How Sustainable Impact Foundation contributes

Sustainable Impact Foundation supports Polity as a systems partner and translator between governance innovation and real-world adoption across impact verticals. Our contributions include:

Designing engagements through a complexity lens so processes surface incentives, power dynamics, and feedback loops, not just preferences
Supporting governance choices related to data sovereignty, consent, and benefit-sharing, especially where civic data may be monetized
Helping connect the approach to policy innovation across domains such as affordable housing, climate, AI, education, and healthcare
Mobilizing learnings into reusable templates, principles, and practice guidance so others can adapt the model locally

Related Focus Areas

Connected themes

Digital Stewardship

Public-interest governance for AI, data, and digital infrastructure that protects rights and builds trust.

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Relational Infrastructure

Building the connective tissue of collaboration, deep democracy, and shared stewardship across sectors and regions.

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Complexity & Resilience

Working with uncertainty, feedback loops, and emergence to strengthen systems that can learn, adapt, and endure.

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Interested in this work?

We welcome collaborations with governments, philanthropies, networks, and community actors and rightsholders who want to strengthen public engagement while changing how power and value flow through civic data and decision-making.

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