Global SafetyWatch
Why now
People are asked less and decided for more, and the tools that could change that are arriving faster than the rules for using them. That is the moment this programme is built for.
The gap
Most people want the same things for the place they live, and most of them are never asked in a way that counts. Polls sample opinion cold. Consultations arrive after the decision. Petitions collect names and no reply. The result is a country that governs against its own quiet majority more often than anyone measures, and pays for it twice: when the decision fails, and when it is undone.
What the evidence says works
Where the public has been asked properly, with the facts beside the question and time to weigh them, and where the authority has committed in advance to respond, the results have changed law. Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies preceded the referendums that settled questions polarised for decades. The OECD’s study of nearly three hundred such processes puts the public commitment to respond at the centre of what makes them work. That commitment, and the record of whether it was honoured, is what this programme adds. Sources are on Others in this field.
What the public asks of AI
The public is not against software in public decisions. It is against software it cannot see. In the largest UK survey of attitudes to AI, more than nine in ten people said it matters that AI treats people fairly, and comfort rose where there were explanations, human oversight and clear labelling. This site is built to those conditions: the models are named, their job is bounded, every published result is signed by a named person, and nothing AI-written is unlabelled.
The founder’s view
The AI revolution is bringing the 21st century to this lifetime. Used well, it can do for a whole constituency what a good politician’s office does for one caller: listen, check, sort, and put the answer in front of the person who decides. Used badly, it will be one more way of talking at people. The difference is whether the response is recorded. That is why this programme keeps the register before it keeps anything else.
Propose a question for your area
Survey figures: Ada Lovelace Institute and The Alan Turing Institute, How do people feel about AI, wave two, fieldwork October to November 2024, published March 2025. Deliberative processes: OECD, Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions, 2020. Nothing on this site is legal advice.