What members produce, how the group is composed, and the rhythm of the work from June to December 2026.
Each member develops one Provocation — an assertive, directional claim about what is failing and what must change — and pursues it across three connected essays, each doing a distinct kind of work. The three essays are the working group's primary output, and their ambition is concrete: each one points toward new institutional designs for democracy in the age of AI.
Guiding question: What transformation in the informational conditions of democracy are you diagnosing? This essay identifies a change, pressure, or failure in democratic life and grounds the member's perspective in a specific problem.
Guiding question: What new concept, democratic possibility, or institutional imaginary does this open? This essay moves from diagnosis to possibility and asks what democracy might need to become if the diagnosis is taken seriously.
Guiding question: What would this imply in practice? This essay translates the Provocation into institutional, infrastructural, civic, policy, technological, or design implications.
The working group brings together scholars and practitioner-intellectuals whose work crosses the boundaries between complexity science, democratic theory, cognitive science, computational social science, institutional design, and non-Western democratic experience. The composition reflects a deliberate commitment: to genuine interdisciplinarity rather than multidisciplinarity, and to intellectual diversity as a structural feature of the inquiry rather than an ornament.
Members have been selected on the criterion that their work cannot be fully located within a single discipline, and that their presence in the same room will generate productive friction rather than comfortable agreement. The working group is not a panel of experts assembled to endorse a predetermined conclusion. It is an intellectual community convened to work on a genuinely difficult set of questions — and to produce, from that work, insights that none of its members could have reached alone.
The working group runs from June to December 2026 and is organized around three workstreams: Provocations, the conceptual work carried by the core members; Synthesis, led by the organizers, drawing concepts and tensions across the group; and Field Conditions, an organizer-led inquiry into what it would take to carry the agenda forward.
This work feeds directly into a broader conceptual project. The working group's Substack, Informational Democracy, is the public knowledge layer of the project, organized around four formats: Provocations (the core members' essays), Synthesis Notes (organizer reflections after each phase), Field Notes (shorter pieces on ecosystem, funding, policy, and continuation), and Framework Pieces (the integrative writing that consolidates the emerging framework). Together they build a public intellectual presence for the questions the group is working on as the inquiry unfolds.
The working group is not convened to produce scholarship for scholars. The intellectual work is real and the academic ambition genuine — but the test of success is not citation counts or journal placements. It is whether the ideas developed here find their way into the hands of people positioned to act on them, and whether they seed the conditions for a field that will outlast this first cycle of work.
This is a theory of change as much as a research program — and the theory has a longer arc than six months. The working group's immediate contribution is agenda-setting: establishing the Provocations worth arguing about, building the intellectual community capable of arguing about them rigorously, and producing a body of work — essays, a collaboratively developed open theory, a public Substack presence — that can travel across the boundaries between disciplines and between sectors. Its longer ambition is policy: concrete proposals for the redesign of democratic institutions as informational regimes, developed in sufficient depth and with sufficient institutional grounding to be picked up by actors in government, technology, and civil society. That ambition will not be fulfilled in six months. But the agenda-setting work done here — the conceptual foundations laid, the networks established, the vocabulary developed — is what makes it possible.
The cycle runs June to December. Essay deadlines are firm dates; the round windows around them allow for drafting and revision.
The institutions of tomorrow will not be found by protecting what we have inherited. They will be designed — by people willing to think carefully, act ambitiously, and build across the boundaries that have kept the necessary conversations apart.