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

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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

4th June 2020

Our story so far – action research in local democracy…Year One

We are excited to share reports from our Year One work with Calderdale Metropolitan Borough and Frome Town Council. Our prototyping reports document our design process, and what was learnt from prototyping some new approaches to citizen participation. And the discovery reports outline the needs we were responding to and the context in each place. If you want to follow the whole story of the first year, including our other two councils, there is also a full programme report.