We are now living in a democratic emergency. Autocrats, authoritarians and outright fascists appear to be on an inexorable rise, while few politicians seem capable of charting a credible path forward in the face of today’s immense challenges. Maybe the challenge is not just that we need better politicians, but that the rules of democracy are broken… and we need to write new ones.

Join Jon Alexander, author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, and he meets three people with direct experience of doing exactly that. As Chief Creative Officer of Mexico City, a role she was invited to create for herself, Gabriella Gomez Mont led the crowdsourcing of the city’s pioneering Constitution over a three month period in 2017. Smari McCarthy complements this with direct experience of Iceland’s attempt at constitutional crowdsourcing. And Oli Whittington is just at the beginning of a new campaign to crowdsource a People’s Charter for the renewal of UK democracy.

Event Schedule

6:00pm: Pre-event socialising and networking

A cash bar will be available for refreshments.

6:15pm: Event begins

7:30pm: Event ends

Speakers:

Gabriella Gómez-Mont is the founder and director of Experimentalista, a novel type of nomadic and creative office specialized in cities – and that constantly shifts shape to accommodate high-level, transdisciplinary collaborations across the world. She was also the former Chief Creative Officer of Mexico City, and the founder of Laboratorio para la Ciudad (2013 – 2018), the award-winning experimental arm and creative think-tank of the Mexico City government, reporting to the Mayor.

Smári McCarthy is an Icelandic-Irish politician and activist known for his work relating to direct democracy, transparency and privacy. He is a serial democratic innovator, co-founding the Shadow Parliament Initiative, the Icelandic Digital Freedom Society, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative – and perhaps most significantly, the Icelandic Pirate Party, for whom he was elected as an MP in 2016. He was heavily involved in designing the process to crowdsource Iceland’s constitution in 2011/12. Since 2021 he has been working on environmental and economic strategic intelligence.

Oli Whittington is a participatory and strategic designer who has worked on everything from urban transformation to how we fund social change. His work combines design, participatory and deliberative practices to tackle systemic challenges through community-led design and governance. He is now one of the initiating team of the Our House campaign to crowdsource a People’s Charter for the renewal of UK democracy, inspired by the Chartists of the 19th Century.

Jon Alexander is the author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, and co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a book and company that work to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. Among other plaudits, CITIZENS was listed by McKinsey as one of its Top 5 Recommended Books in its Summer Reading Guide 2022, described as “an underground hit” in the Financial Times, and selected by the World Economic Forum for its CEO Book Club. Jon began his career with a decade in the advertising industry, before shifting his attention to understanding how communications skills might be deployed to invite people into their agency as citizens, instead of just selling stuff to them as consumers.