Your first decision, step by step.
From creating your account to acting on the outcome — a complete recipe for running your group's first decision on Civil Democracy.
Setting up takes about twenty minutes; the decision itself takes as long as your group wants to give it. The best way to use this page: keep it open in a separate window and work through the steps side by side, from registering to results. And start small — a board choosing its meeting format, an association picking between three venues, a family settling where to spend the holidays. A first decision doesn't need to be weighty to show how this works.
Three moves, one decision.
Before you set anything up, it helps to feel the mechanics in your hands. Everything on this platform comes down to three moves. You give trust: to the people and groups whose judgment you value, each as much or as little as you like. They rank in public: every trusted actor states openly how they order the options, and why. The system combines the two: your trust and their public rankings produce a personalized recommendation — computed by comparing every pair of options, weighted by your trust — beside the result the whole group reaches by the same method. And the recommendation is exactly that: yours to keep or overrule.
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.
Flip between the leanings. Same options, same actors — different trust, different decision. That's individualized representation at work.
Take one actor to zero, by clicking on the leftmost star a second time. Your ranking changes; the room's barely moves. Your trust shapes yourrecommendation, not everyone else's.
Find a setting where your ranking differs from the room's. That gap isn't an error — it's the honest picture of where you stand within your group.
From account to outcome.
Create your account.
Register with your email address, confirm the verification message, and log in. That's the whole entry — no payment, no profile-building. If you're following along in a second window, do it now: the rest of this page will match what you see on screen.
Open your space.
A space is the room where your group decides — bounded, invisible to outsiders, and yours to shape. Create oneand name it after the real group it serves: the board, the association, the house, the family. One honest tip: resist the urge to open a space for "everyone." A space works when the people in it are genuinely affected by the same decisions.
Invite the people it affects.
Your space allows to create invite codes for the members of your group. Share themwith the people the decisions will touch — by mail, by message, on paper at the next meeting. Each person registers and enters the code, and they're in. Who counts as affected? A useful rule: anyone who would have to live with the outcome should have the chance to weigh in on it.
More on inviting
Invite codes aren't visible right away — the option to create them appears once your space is set up. Create one code per person: every code is individual, and it should only be used by the specific person it was sent to. That's what keeps the room bounded — everyone inside was invited by name. One code, one member.
Let trust become visible.
This is the step that makes it Civil Democracy rather than a poll. Members can rate the people or groups whose judgment they trust — each individually, on their own scale, changeable at any moment. In a first decision, trust starts person to person: members who make their rankings visible and argue for them become someone others can lean on.
But even small communities are rarely just a collection of individuals. There are almost always sub-groups that have found a common position: the commission within a community, the institute board or chair within a faculty, one nuclear family or one generation within an extended family. On Civil Democracy, such a sub-group can make its shared opinion visible as a group actor — rank the options once, in public, and let members who trust its judgment be represented through it. This is how the trust layer grows naturally: from neighbours, to the groups among them, and — as your space's decisions widen — to established organisations beyond it.
And trust remains what it is everywhere on this platform: optional and revocable. Whoever trusts no one simply ranks the options themselves.
More on trust
At the very beginning, the trust page shows only the open actors of two example decisions — there so you can try trust out before anyone in your own space has stepped forward. As Civil Democracy grows, it fills with open actors for other decisions in the global public square.
Any voter can step into the role. To become an individual open actor, open your account page and choose "Create your individual OA": a short form — a portrait, a short name, a few lines about yourself — and from then on you can make your rankings and your arguments public, there for others to see, to weigh, and to lean on.
Groups work the same way. On the same page, choose "Enter an organisation" to make an existing group visible as an open actor — the commission, the board, the nuclear family — and manage its public rankings on its behalf. What was an informal common position becomes something members can formally place their trust in.
Create the decision.
Now pose the question. A good decision has a clearly stated question and genuinely distinct options — not "Option A and two strawmen," but real alternatives someone could honestly prefer. Take your time here: the quality of the options determines the quality of the decision. If members disagree about what the options even are, that conversation belongs before the decision opens — and often improves it more than anything else.
More on decisions and options
And the list of options doesn't freeze when the decision opens: within the process, every open actor — and hence every voter stepping into that role — can make alternative proposals, adding options to the list. Often that's where the compromise appears that everyone can live with.
Everyone weighs in.
With the decision open, every member chooses how to take part, and each way counts. Rank yourself: order the options by your own judgment. Be represented: leave it to your trust — the rankings of the people and groups you trust are read through your trust levels and combined into your recommendation. Abstain: a recorded choice to sit this one out, visibly different from silence. And alongside the rankings, members and group actors can attach arguments — reasons why one option should beat another, stated pairwise, so disagreement stays concrete instead of general.
Read the result.
While the decision runs, your own ranking is always in front of you on the participation screen — formed from your direct ranking or, if you're represented, from your trust. When the decision closes, the results page shows what the group decided: the winning option, how the other options fared against it, and how many members took part directly or through representation — resolved by the same pairwise, trust-weighted method the widget above demonstrates. Compare the two, and sometimes they won't match. When your ranking differs from the group's, nothing has failed — you're seeing precisely where you stand within your collective, which is more than most decision processes ever show you.
Act on it, and say so.
Civil Democracy forms and aggregates informed preferences; what your group does with the outcome is up to your group — the platform doesn't enforce anything, and honestly, it shouldn't. What makes the second decision easier than the first is closing the loop: "we decided X, and we did X." Groups that say this out loud discover that the deciding itself gets better — options come sharper, arguments more honest, trust more considered. That's the recipe repeating.
Twenty minutes to your first decision.
Keep this page open, and begin where every decision begins.