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

11th November 2020

We Want Your Stories!

We are pulling together case studies about citizens being involved in decision-making at a local level. We want your ideas of great stories to include. In particular, we want examples that show: What impact citizen participation can have New ways of involving citizens in decision-making What shapes decision-maker’s attitudes towards citizen participation How citizens feel about taking part How learning about good practice is being shared and efforts joined-up Where government at other levels are taking interest and supporting local participation So far, we’ve focussed on the UK and Europe, but we’d love to hear ideas from further afield too.

Read more