Demicracy is the open-source coordination platform behind The Front State. Where The Front State is the philosophy and political project, Demicracy is the actual tooling — the how behind the why.
Communities — schools, PTAs, volunteer leagues, neighborhood groups, town governments — have coordination problems that today’s tools don’t solve well. Email threads die. Group chats fragment. Surveys disappear into spreadsheets nobody reopens. Nothing connects to anything else. Decisions get made in private and announced after.
Demicracy is the platform-engineering answer: a coherent stack that gives any community the same kind of coordination infrastructure governments and large organizations get, without requiring a tech budget or a vendor relationship.
These aren’t projects we’re building from scratch. They’re proven open-source components integrated into a coherent civic-coordination layer. Demicracy’s contribution is the integration, the patterns, and the documentation — not yet-another-platform.
Additional inspiration is drawn from the civis platform Decidim
Demicracy is in active development. Some components are deployed in pieces; others are still designs. This site reflects ongoing thinking, not a shipped product.
The first working case study is the West Orange (NJ) school district budget crisis — a $14M+ deficit, an exhausted board, and a community of a thousand people who showed up to a meeting with no good way to coordinate. The community-built proposal stack lives at schools.frontstate.org and demonstrates what one part of the platform — public, version-controlled documentation of community proposals with worked examples and ready-to-file templates — can look like in practice.
Other parts of the platform (federation, identity, Backstage integration, the full Process-in-Git workflow) are documented in the design docs but not yet running as a unified system.
“Demicracy” vs “Democracy”: the familiar term comes from “demos” (common people) + “kratos” (rule), and is well-understood, usually about a people overall and their style of government - individual votes and what they result in.
The objective of the variant comes from “demes” as a term from Classical Greece representing people in a sub-group, like a neighborhood, with the intent being to bridge these groups and share solutions across them.
In other words Demicracy is oriented around the local, but grows from there - one neighborhood becomes two with their own Demicracy instances, then you end up reaching a whole city, a county, a state, and so on, keeping a local focus on people but an increasingly larger pool of solutions to share among the groups.
More documents and plans exist, but are pending further polish before being published. For anybody curious to get early access do get in touch!
If you’re a builder interested in civic-tech, a community organizer who wants to apply this somewhere, or a curious citizen trying to understand what’s being built:
Demicracy is open source. Coordination infrastructure shouldn’t be a luxury available only to organizations with IT budgets.