Public Square

Public Square is an action-research programme to understand how citizens can be more involved in making local decisions.

We are working with councils, residents, and councillors in four places in the UK to understand how they can improve their local democracies.

Led by mySociety and The Democratic Society – and funded by Luminate. We will use a variety of new approaches, including digital tools, and new ways of doing democracy, to help these places tackle a local democracy challenge.

What we learn will help us to offer practical help for others to improve local democracy. We'll be sharing in guides, playbooks and other publicly available resources in the near future.

Project leads

Funded by

Want to find out more about Public Square?

We know that Public Square is part of a bigger whole. If you are interested in talking to us you can email our programme team.

If you’d like to follow the Public Square programme, you can:

Latest
blog post

16th July 2020

Key Ingredients for Co-Production

– Annie Cook, Namita Kambli At first glance the phrase ‘Co-Production’ might seem straightforward. Yet there exists a daunting array of writing on the topic, leading to as many definitions of this term as there are interpretations. Despite no single agreed upon definition, we have found that most good Co-Production does have certain key ingredients that define it:  recognition that everyone has something to contribute sharing of power giving agency to those often not included in processes that affect their lives To unpack these ideas and better understand how they work in practice, we brought together an inspiring panel of

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