Democracy 2.0: Millennial-Generated Change to American Governance
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Democracy 2.0
Millennial-Generated Change
to American Governance
Beginning a process to upgrade a democracy can
be quite simple. It can, and did, start with one mil-
lennial at a university campus in Berkeley,
California. Over the last six years, the now-national
youth civic engagement organization Mobilize.org
has taken the feeling of exclusion that members of
the millennial generation have felt from the political
process and created a network of social entrepre-
neurs who are working to institutionalize a citizen-
centered approach to solving the problems in
American government.
Democracy 2.0, a term coined by the organization's
founder, twenty-eight-year-old David Smith, finds its
roots at the level of the individual citizen identifying
problems in local, state, and national systems of
government and society. Once problems are identi-
fied, citizens must engage in conversation and search
for innovative solutions to the problems they have
identified. Mobilize.org seeks to empower the indi-
vidual to move past the deliberation stage, enabling
members of the millennial generation to implement
their own solutions. Through the success of citizen-
generated initiatives, the goal of Democracy 2.0 is to
institutionalize millennial-generated solutions as a
staple of American governance at all levels.
The model for arriving at this theory of change was
based on the premise that millennials were thought
leaders in their own right. By implementing a
research model of aggregating the collective intelli-
gence of members of the generation, it enabled
Mobilize.org to arrive at the issues and characteris-
tics necessary to effect its theory of change.
Research with members of the millennial generation
was conducted from July 4, 2007, to December 31,
2007. Through implementation of the Democracy
© 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)
32 National Civic Review DOI: 10.1002/ncr.222 Fall 2008
BY CHRISTINA M. GAGNIER
2.0 Survey, the Democracy 2.0 Summit, and the mil-
lennial gathering (the Party for the Presidency),
Mobilize.org took the direct input of 1,828 mem-
bers of the millennial generation into refining
Democracy 2.0.
Democracy Is an Unfinished Project. It's Time We
Upgrade. [Democracy 2.0 Declaration]
As a millennial-led organization, Mobilize.org
enjoyed a unique vantage point for conducting its
research. The first part of the process was to ad-
minister a nationwide survey of millennials. There
were three primary areas of focus in this survey:
What is and is not working within our democracy?
Which characteristics define the millennial genera-
tion, and how does this uniquely position us to
improve our democracy? What does Democracy
2.0 look like? Questions in the survey were meant
to challenge Mobilize.org's own interpretation of
what the term Democracy 2.0 meant to the millen-
nial generation.
Government and Millennial Perceptions
Two key elements of the survey were of particular
significance. The first was the portion of the survey
where information was collected on the perceptions
millennials had of American government, specifi-
cally identifying areas where they perceived the
government was properly serving, or failing to
serve, the public interest. As a measure of general
sentiment, 43 percent of the survey respondents
said that society was somewhat successful at
addressing its most important problems, while 44
percent said that society was not not very success-
ful. Three issues emerged regarding the success of
American government: public education, national
¼ Inter Science](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/natmnr97&div=30&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Democracy 2.0: Millennial-Generated Change to American Governance
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