From Protest to Policy
The next generation of civic technology isn’t about amplifying voices. It’s about helping societies make better decisions together.
No generation has been better at using digital technologies to organize for political change than Gen Z. Across Africa and around the world, the uses of WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, TikTok and Instagram have fundamentally changed who participates in public life and how quickly collective action can emerge.
In Sri Lanka, mass protests forced a sitting president to flee the country. In Bangladesh, students helped bring down a government that had held power for fifteen years. In Kenya, Nigeria, Nepal and Serbia, digitally enabled movements have reshaped national political debates, challenged entrenched elites, and put corruption, economic justice and democratic accountability firmly on the public agenda.
Yet there is a striking gap between mobilization and governance.
Gen Z Uprising: Youth, Protests and Peace Advocacy in Africa by Building Blocks for Peace documents the growing power of digitally enabled youth movements across the continent. Their insights resonate with a forthcoming report by Search for Common Ground which analyses more than 500,000 protest events across 200 countries and territories, alongside interviews in ten countries and AI-supported deliberations involving young people from twenty-two countries. Rather than asking whether a government fell or a leader resigned, the authors asked: what changed afterwards? Did institutions become more accountable? Were laws reformed? Did young people’s lives improve?
Across the twenty major Gen Z-led movements assessed, only a handful produced durable institutional reform or measurable improvements in people’s lives. Most succeeded in shifting public debate. Far fewer succeeded in changing the systems they were protesting.
We’ve built digital infrastructure for protest. We have invested far less in digital infrastructure for collective decision-making.
Civic AI as care infrastructure
In her Civic AI: 6-Pack of Care manifesto, Taiwan’s former Digital Minister Audrey Tang argues that the next generation of civic technology should move beyond voice towards helping societies make better decisions together. She proposes:
Move from outrage to overlap.
Most digital platforms reward conflict because conflict captures attention. Deliberative technologies are designed to reveal where unexpected common ground already exists, without pretending disagreement has disappeared.Bridge first, decide second.
Rather than forcing people to take sides from the outset, start by identifying shared concerns and areas of overlap. Decisions reached after people understand one another are more likely to be seen as legitimate—even when they remain contested.Build broad listening before broad agreement.
Harness technology not to force people to join a ‘for or against’ campaign, or respond to narrow polling. Deliberative technologies help institutions listen broadly to people's lived experience before asking them to take sides. Once we’ve done that, AI can help us make sense of millions of qualitative inputs, without foregrounding assumed positions or constituencies.Make governance a daily capability, not just a periodic vote.
Democracy shouldn’t begin and end with elections or one-off consultations. Institutions that continuously listen, respond and adapt are better equipped to build trust, strengthen belonging and make more legitimate collective decisions over time.
The first generation of civic technology expanded voice. Civic AI asks a harder question: can technology help strengthen the relationships between citizens and institutions that make collective decision-making possible?
Generating Civic Memory
Some of the most promising evidence comes from a review of the last year of work at Jigsaw, an incubator within Google that explores technology solutions to complex global challenges.
In Kentucky, nearly 8,000 residents contributed to shaping the county’s twenty-five-year comprehensive plan. The innovation wasn’t simply that more people participated. It was that the consultation became an enduring civic resource. Local agencies continued drawing on the findings. Schools used them in civic education. Developers and entrepreneurs turned to them to understand community priorities. The consultation became civic memory rather than a one-off event.
These insights are being replicated by initiatives such as The Forum in South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire, elevating tens of thousands of voices in an open dialogue before pursuing deeper deliberations with smaller cohorts on residents’ priorities.
A similar lesson is emerging from peacebuilding.
Broad listening builds trust
The Toda Peace Institute report, Deliberative Technologies in Youth, Peace & Security: Promise, Practice, and the Uptake Gap, draws on eighteen months of experimentation by Search for Common Ground across Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and global Youth, Peace and Security processes. One example highlighted comes from Nigeria’s review of its Youth, Peace and Security National Action Plan. Instead of relying primarily on workshops in Abuja, young people from conflict-affected regions participated through WhatsApp voice notes using Talk to the City, speaking in their own languages through channels they already trusted.
Young people surfaced concerns about policing abuses, educational exclusion and local conflict dynamics that diverged in important ways from what those in Abuja were experiencing. The technology didn’t manufacture consensus. It produced a richer, more representative picture of reality.
That is what Tang describes as broad listening: helping institutions or governance processes understand what people closest to a problem are already seeing, but which existing systems routinely miss. This is paired with attentiveness: what are people closest to the problem noticing? It then asks who is responsible for acting, whether institutions are responsive enough to repair harm when they get it wrong, and whether governance remains local, contestable and accountable.
Care, in this framework, is not a sentiment. It is infrastructure.
Peacebuilders have long understood that trust isn’t about manufacturing consensus. It grows through repeated experiences of being heard, responding to one another’s needs, and reaching outcomes that former adversaries are willing to defend together.
Civic AI suggests those same relational principles can now be designed into democratic institutions themselves. As Audrey Tang writes, “We, the people, are the superintelligence.”
That is the missing infrastructure between protest and policy.
The first generation of civic technology expanded participation. The next generation may help build the civic care infrastructure that enables societies to move from protest to policy, from outrage to overlap, and from voice to collective decision-making.
Lena Slachmuijlder is Senior Advisor for digital peacebuilding at Search for Common Ground, a Practitioner Fellow at the USC Neely Center, and Co-chair of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.
Did you miss our Global Expo in May ‘From Mitigating Harms to Intentional Design’? You can watch all the sessions here