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

22nd November 2019

What’s happening next for Public Square: Innovating Local Democracy and sharing our learning

You might have noticed that we have recently stopped producing our week notes. That’s because our first year of work with councils and communities has more or less come to an end. Instead, most of our time is now being spent on reflecting on what we’ve learnt and on our first-year report. The team are beavering away making sure all the learning from the programme is recorded and considered – so it’s a busy time but a quieter, more reflective one. We are also working on another very exciting development.  In Manchester 27-28th January 2019, we’ll be presenting our first

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