The Question of Your Transition, Mr. Mayor-Elect, Is How to Institutionalize the Democratic Energy That Brought You Here
CC BY-SA 4.0
TO: Community Organizing Subcommittee, Mamdani Transition Team
FROM: Liz Barry, Executive Director, Metagov
RE: Building Civic Engagement Infrastructure That Earns and Sustains Trust
DATE: December 15, 2025
An incoming Mamdani administration has an extraordinary opportunity to transform the 104,000 volunteers who knocked 3.1 million doors into a durable system for political participation. The question before this transition is not just how to govern, but how to institutionalize the democratic energy that brought it here. By the end of Mayor Mamdani's first term, the majority of New Yorkers could personally participate in the governance of their community, by building on and scaling a wide range of existing civic engagement infrastructure in City government.
The Challenge: From Campaign Energy to Governing Capacity
NYC's statutory citizen engagement processes—community board meetings, ULURP hearings, city council testimony, participatory budgeting, environmental reviews, community & citywide Education Councils—are structured with what we might call feudal defaults. Residents show up seeking access to decisions that have already been shaped. Barriers to meaningful participation remain high: meetings lack remote access and transcripts, no childcare support, no stipends for time, opaque processes that erode trust. The result? People lose hope in the speed and responsiveness of government, and democracies fall from the inside—abandoned by constituents who tried to participate and found the doors effectively closed.
This is not just a process problem. It's a capacity problem. Currently, government lacks the muscle memory and institutional infrastructure to listen at scale, learn across diverse standpoints, and respond in ways that demonstrate competence and build trust.
A Framework of Democratic Renewal for NYC
Strengthening civic engagement infrastructure delivers three critical outcomes:
Better policy, better use of resources.
When participation processes genuinely surface community knowledge, policy becomes better tuned to needs on the ground, saving money by getting it right the first time. Taiwan's Participation Officers Network, which places trained facilitators across 32 ministries, was inspired by the insight that government staff themselves have ideas for improvement but lack channels to contribute and coordinate across agencies.
Social cohesion through procedural fairness and political access. Trust in government increases not just when people win their preferred outcomes, but when they perceive the process itself as fair and their voices as genuinely heard. Belgium's German-speaking community (population 80,000) institutionalized permanent citizen assemblies in 2019—randomly selected residents, paid $133/day, made recommendations that lawmakers must respond to. Five years in, the model has produced concrete policy changes while rebuilding trust across political divides. The outcome and the mechanism matters.
Living public institutions for the digital age. Legislative bodies struggle to keep up with the volume of conflicts, values, and ideas in contemporary urban life. Strengthening sense-making capacity with assistive technology allows government to meet complexity without paralysis. Participatory democracy is a muscle, and we need gymnasiums for exercising how we hear each other.
Principles for Renewal
These outcomes become achievable when engagement processes follow key principles:
Make participation the default, not the exception. Design processes where meaningful input is automatic at each decision stage, not something residents must fight for. Remote access, meeting transcripts, translation services, compensation for time—these are currently special accommodations, but should be baseline.
Build listening infrastructure at scale. Create regular, structured opportunities for collective deliberation beyond crisis moments. Technology can help: tools like Talk to the City (developed by AI Objectives Institute, now adopted by Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs and equipped with a local language model), enable governments to listen to thousands of voices while preserving nuance and individual perspectives—making large-scale deliberation auditable and navigable without flattening diversity.
Coordinate across silos. The New York City Civic Engagement Commission, the Civics for All Program, community boards, agency outreach teams, participatory budgeting programs—these exist in separate orbits. Learning from Taiwan's model, create roles that bridge not just government-citizen gaps but coordinate across agencies and “serve the public servants.”
Design for capture resistance. Build systems that resist domination by well-funded interests, politically connected organizations, or platform monopolies. Interoperability (so that people don’t get stuck in one platform), transparency of the combined results, and tools that are themselves governable by the people who use them are key.
Start deliberately, institutionalize based on evidence. Pilot new approaches at limited scale. East Belgium’s citizen assembly began experimentally; permanence followed demonstrated success. NYC's Civic Engagement Commission has existing infrastructure that could host experimental deliberative processes before citywide scaling.
Technology as Infrastructure for Self-Rule
Metagov's work expands collective self-governance in a digital age—with assistive technology not replacing human judgment, but expanding our capacity to determine our fates together.
Technology only strengthens democracy when the tools themselves are publicly governed. The trajectory is clear: open-source tools shift power from corporate control toward public sovereignty, a shift that aligns with the values of the Mamdani administration. An incoming administration should anticipate this shift and manage risk by ensuring NYC builds participation infrastructure it actually controls.
An Invitation
The fresh energy of civic engagement that led to November's victory can indeed transform into the collective project of governing—if we design the mechanisms deliberately. Metagov brings expertise in collective intelligence methods, connections to government innovators (Taiwan's digital ministry, Scotland's public procurement model. East Belgium’s democratic permanent infrastructure, the State of California’s Engaged California), and relationships throughout the democratic renewal ecosystem.
We would be honored to support this transition in thinking through how NYC strengthens its civic muscle—not as outside consultants, but as partners committed to designing methods for the madness, so our complexity cannot be weaponized against us.
Onward,
Liz Barry
Executive Director, Metagov
lizbarry.net | metagov.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth “Liz” Barry (US/Ireland) is a world-leading expert in real-time systems for gathering, analyzing, and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words. She is the Executive Director of Metagov.org, a nonprofit laboratory for self-governance in a digital age, where she directs a research area on interoperable deliberative tooling. Previously, she served as Head of Partnerships at The Computational Democracy Project, the foundation she co-founded with the creators of the Polis technology to steward open source code and methods for collective intelligence. Since witnessing the Sunflower Revolution firsthand in Taipei in 2014, Liz has tracked the democratic upgrades in Taiwan, and worked with facilitators, social movements, civil society organisations, journalists, indigenous nations, peacebuilders, and democratic governments young and old to implement "listening at scale" in 25 countries and counting. Her innovations in large-scale interactions began years ago when she painted “TALK TO ME” on a sign and listened to over 100,000 people on the sidewalks of New York City and around the United States. These and her other participatory science initiatives have been covered by the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, The BBC, PBS, NPR, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Guardian, This American Life, The New Yorker, Associated Press, Reuters, Nature, and other national and international media outlets.
