Decide together by trusting the people and groups you already trust.
Civil Democracy brings the ballot into the 21st century. You weight the actors you trust; they rank the options in public; the system proposes a decision that's yours — and you can always overrule it. Stay silent and your influence may lose precision, but you'll never be ignored.
An improved kind of democracy, on 21st-century technology.
The ballot was an ingenious way to store trust at scale — but it froze two boundaries in place: between politicians and voters, and between voters of opposing parties. Stored digitally, trust becomes flexible. Any actor — a party, an NGO, a specialist, a neighbour — can take responsibility for the decisions that fit them. And for every single decision, you choose whether to be represented or to decide for yourself.
Move the trust. Watch the decision change.
Give each actor as much or as little trust as you like, and watch your own ranking form — beside the result the whole room reaches by the same method.
How should our town use the old riverside lot?
You never hand over your vote. You decide how much to trust each actor — the system reads their public rankings through your trust and proposes one for you.
Public park beats every option head-to-head, weighted by your trust. Driven mostly by your trust in Green Spaces Alliance and Residents for Quiet Streets.
The room lands on Mixed-use market hall — different from your Public park. Same method, different trust. Your own ratings would join this tally once you register.
It borrows the best of three democracies and drops their traps.
You don't have to know everything
Nobody holds an informed view on every question. Trusted actors carry the load you choose to hand them issue by issue. If a decision is too heavy for you, you're still in, represented through their expertise.
No four-year bundle
Trust is given to your very individual portfolio of actors you trust, and withdrawn the moment it's lost. You're not locked into one package you can't unpick, and you can participate in every decision you want to.
Trust a portfolio, not one delegate
Liquid democracy passes your vote to a single delegate at a time. Civil Democracy lets you weight a whole portfolio of trusted actors — and recognises that civil society's specialised organisations are the most important among them.
We call them Open Actors because their positions are public, for everyone to see and to weigh — that openness is what lets trust be given with eyes open.
Civil Democracy starts with you.
Open a space for any group whose decisions matter, invite the people it affects with a code, and turn every question into a decision anyone can weigh in on — directly, or through the actors they trust.
A civil-society coalition
Assemble a shared position across chapters and allied organisations without flattening anyone's voice.
A membership organisation
Let members steer real choices between meetings — a board, a union, an association, a party section.
A community
Decide the questions in front of a neighbourhood or town with everyone it touches at the table.
Built from the research, not bolted onto it.
Civil Democracy is the applied form of years of work in political science, economics, and sociology — set out across books and peer-reviewed research, and now built into a platform you can use. It's a working answer, not a manifesto.
The questions people ask first.
No. Trust weights whose judgment informs your ranking. It's up to you to leave it set or to change it at any time.
Rank the options yourself. Representation is an option you take when it suits you, not a requirement.
It's built and hosted in Switzerland under Swiss jurisdiction, and your trust ratings are never sold or shared.
Civil Democracy forms and aggregates informed preferences. What your group does with the outcome is up to your group.
No. As the platform grows it will pass to a non-profit foundation under Swiss law — one whose board, in the long run and by a predefined plan, is elected by its global voters.
Start with one decision.
Open a space, invite the people it affects, and let the question decide itself — through everyone's trust.