About the course
Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era
This free, self-paced course equips public servants with the skills needed to plan, run, learn from, and institutionalize meaningful engagement with communities.
Designed for public professionals globally, the course responds to a common challenge in public service: many institutions know engagement matters, but lack clear guidance on how to do it well. Learners gain practical, design-focused skills for running engagement across contexts, including consultation, deliberation, co-creation, and other ways of listening to communities.
Delivered through short, accessible videos, the 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 artificial intelligence can responsibly support public engagement by reducing time, cost, and complexity while improving accessibility, inclusion, and insight, without replacing human judgment.
Developed in collaboration with The GovLab and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard University and a design and advisory board of 50+ global experts on public engagement
The course builds upon the Reboot Democracy workshop series, a set of live sessions on how to design effective and efficient AI-enhanced community engagement that translates public input into meaningful outcomes. Learn more.
At-your-own pace
Certificate of completion
This course complies with WCAG2.1 web accessibility standards
Course curriculum
1. Why Engagement Matters Today
Why public engagement is essential for democratic legitimacy and requires matching different methods to different purposes, and how AI can support throughout the engagement process.
2. A Checklist for Planning Your Engagement
Introduces a nine-step framework for planning successful AI-enabled engagement—from defining goals to demonstrating impact—showing how AI can enhance each step while maintaining human judgment and democratic accountability at the center.
3. Defining Goals for Engagement and Action
Covers the importance of setting clear, realistic goals to guide the engagement and how you can use AI to help articulate your goals
4. Choosing Who Participates
How to identify participants who match your engagement goals, the trade-offs between self-selection and targeted selection approaches, and ways AI can help identify diverse participants with relevant experience and expertise.
5. Designing Outreach Strategies
How to design outreach strategies that reach underrepresented communities, using both online and in-person outreach methods, and how you can use AI tools to accelerate, personalize, and scale outreach efforts while maintaining accessibility and trust.
6. Ensuring Ownership, Accountability and Action
Why clear ownership and accountability are essential and the unique ownership responsibilities in AI-enabled engagement.
7. Designing Incentives for Participation
Strategies to drive equitable participation while reducing barriers, and how AI tools can help to reinforce incentives by showing participants that their input will be used and valued.
8. Defining the Tasks: What You Ask Participants to Do
How to develop clear tasks that align participant contributions with project objectives, how to select engagement platforms that put those tasks into practice, and how to use AI tools to process inputs at scale.
9. Designing Workflows from Input to Impact
How to design clear workflows that specify tasks and responsibilities at each engagement phase and identify where AI can support processing under human supervision.
10. Evaluating Inputs
How to design clear evaluation criteria aligned with project goals, why evaluation methods must be defined and communicated upfront, and how you can use AI to process and draw insights from public input while maintaining human oversight.
11. Using What the Group Creates
The importance of using community input and communicating that use back to participants, and how to ensure transparency and accountability in AI-enabled engagement.
12. Conclusion
Close out the course and review course learning objectives and material covered.
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