The Portulans Institute in Washington, DC, in collaboration with the Communication Studies Division in the School of Communication (SOC) at American University, invites you to a forum entitled “Empowering Democracy”.
The forum will present the first report on findings of research by the Portulans Democracy Team on innovations in democracy, entitled “To Empower Democracy”. The report will be discussed throughout the day, accompanied by a keynote entitled “Institutionalizing Participation: From Democratic Innovation to Democratic Practice in the Age of AI” by Professor Beth Simone Noveck. Drawing on her new book, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy (Yale University Press, 2026), her keynote asks what it takes to move democratic innovation from promising experiment to institutional practice. Focusing on more participatory forms of democracy, it explores how public institutions can build the skills, structures, technologies, incentives, and leadership needed to make participation consequential, durable, and scalable in the age of AI.
Our keynote speaker, Beth Simone Noveck, is a professor at Northeastern University with appointments in law, engineering, policy, communications, and computer science. She directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and the GovLab. Her work focuses on how to use AI to strengthen democratic institutions, in line with the overall theme of the forum. She previously served in the White House, at 10 Downing Street, and in the German Chancellery, and was founding Chief AI Strategist and Chief Innovation Officer for the State of New Jersey. Beth founded the White House Open Government Initiative. Today she leads InnovateUS, which supports free public-sector learning, and its research initiative, the Observatory of Public Sector AI — the largest collection of data on the public sector and its use of AI. She created AI for Impact, which designs and deploys open-source AI tools to improve public outcomes, and Solving Public Problems, which trains the next generation of leaders and problem-solvers. In 2026, Beth joined the Australian Resilient Democracy Network as a Global Fellow and the Harvard Kennedy School as a Policy Fellow.
Professor Laura DeNardis will introduce Professor Noveck, and moderate the Q&A for her talk. Dr. DeNardis is Professor and Inaugural Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics and Society at Georgetown University, where she also directs the Center for Digital Ethics. A scholar of technology governance and cybersecurity who has authored eight major books, DeNardis was named one of thirty-two global Innovators Building a Better Future by Wired UK. She is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, where she previously served as Executive Director, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor DeNardis holds an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, an MEng from Cornell University, a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School.
The keynote is a brilliant highlight to a full-day of critical discussion of our study of how we can empower democracy, enabled by innovations shaping democratic institutions and processes. The report, “To Empower Democracy,” is based on cross-national surveys of the public in Brazil, Germany, the UK, and the USA, along with 27 case studies of innovations across 19 countries worldwide.
William Dutton, author of The Fifth Estate, will open the morning with a presentation of key findings of the Portulans Democracy Project. This will be followed by the keynote, and selected case studies from the 27 by members of the Democracy Team, including innovations in public participation, journalism, public institutions and services, and public opinion and civic education — as well as a participant-observer study of the project seeking to use AI to build a Habermasian space for democratic communication.
An overview of the research is available here: https://portulansinstitute.org/portulans-democracy-project/, along with a list of the Democracy Team.
Please join this forum in person or online by registering HERE
