Engaged California’s pilot initiative focusing on recovery from the fires in Los Angeles in early 2025 offers a compelling case study in contemporary public engagement practice, demonstrating both substantive strengths and identifiable areas for refinement.
From the outset, the state of California sought the advice of scholars and established practitioners of democracy innovations. These leaders had designed or overseen deliberative democratic processes in places as distinct as Fort Collins, Colorado; Oakland, California; and the state of New Hampshire. In advance and throughout the process, these experts provide analysis and counsel, noting the importance of developing new tools of public engagement, ensuring that they are engaging and designed for policy impact, leveraging existing and emerging artificial intelligence tools, and taking steps to address power imbalances across communities. These core principles and approaches emerged as areas of success and sites of future refinement. The program’s early stages illuminate how state-led digital engagement can produce timely, civil, and policy-relevant public input; conversely, ensuring representativeness, driving toward greater deliberative depth, and establishing accountability mechanisms are critical considerations for the scaling and institutionalization of this program.
Positive Outcomes of the Pilot Phase
Responsiveness. Responsiveness in public engagement is not merely procedural; it is normative and instrumental. Normatively, it respects citizens’ claims to be heard when their lives are impacted by state decisions. Instrumentally, it enables decisionmakers to marshal contemporary, context-specific information that can improve the fit between policy design and lived experience.
One of the most salient strengths of the Engaged California pilot was its responsiveness: The mechanism created timely opportunities for Californians who were directly affected by the fires to articulate their perspectives and priorities. The pilot’s capacity to surface immediate concerns and preferences of the fire survivors—on how to rebuild their communities and other pressing issues related to disaster prevention, management, and recovery—demonstrates how an administratively driven engagement apparatus can shorten the interval between problem recognition and public consultation, thereby enhancing policy relevance and overall responsiveness.
Political-culture change. Beyond immediate outputs, the pilot is part of an ongoing shift in political culture: It helped set expectations that decisionmakers will act upon public input in a direct way. This is especially important in California, where people have no shortage of opportunities to participate in elections. Citizens of this state elect ten separate constitutional officials and weigh in on a myriad of ballot initiatives. But it is not always clear what the implications of this public participation are, especially given the long-term absence of partisan competition at the state level. Tools such as Engaged California show clearly how detailed and substantive input from people of this state translates directly into coordinated action from their many political leaders and governments. This can cement a culture of responsiveness and rebuild people’s trust in government, which has reached a nadir in California and nationally. Changing political culture, of course, is an incremental enterprise that depends on repeated, credible instances of public voice influencing policy.
The pilot’s structure—linking engagement processes to concrete outputs and recommendations articulated in great detail in the report issued by the Office of Data and Innovation—served to normalize the idea that citizen contributions are not performative but productive. Over time, such practices can recalibrate the relationship between officials and constituents, increase public participation in these processes, and foster greater trust in institutions and improve the perceived legitimacy of state action. As explained by Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The payoff goes beyond generating better pathways to solve real-world problems that depend on reconciling input and ideas from the larger public. The process of generating public ideas and fostering deliberation also helps Californians from all walks of life to learn about how the state navigates its daunting challenges and most promising opportunities on their behalf.”
Turning public input into actionable policy insights. As soon-to-be-published Carnegie California research on AI shows, the public is anxious and uncertain about the technology’s impact on their jobs and even its ability to improve government service delivery. They also are concerned about the extent that it can exacerbate the misinformation in our political environment, including through the production and dissemination of deepfakes. But AI can also vastly improve the information environment, especially to the extent that these tools, combined with the knowledge and discretion of the humans who use them, are deployed to help make sense of voluminous public input into political processes.
A distinguishing capability of the pilot was its emphasis on leveraging AI tools to synthesize long-form, detailed public comments and deliberations into recommendations that explicitly tied back to the underlying public voice. This translational function—moving from raw testimony and deliberation to analytically defensible policy options—is central to the utility of public engagement. The pilot evidenced methods for coding, aggregating, and interpreting qualitative data so that insights were not merely descriptive but prescriptive: Recommendations were linked to participant narratives and emergent themes. This strength underscores the value of investing in analytic capacity that can preserve the texture of public testimony while rendering it usable for evidence-based policymaking. As put by Audrey Tang, the first digital minister of Taiwan who is a global expert and an adviser to the project, “The true potential of AI in democracy isn’t about automating decisions, but about scaling civic care. By transforming thousands of individual experiences into a coherent map of shared priorities, Engaged California demonstrates how we can use AI to facilitate rather than fracture—turning raw input into actionable, co-created policy.”
Civil behavior in online spaces. Finally, the pilot demonstrated that state-facilitated digital forums could foster civil, productive dialogue around contentious topics—and there are not many topics more contentious than how to respond to and recover from traumatic, destructive megafires. In contrast to many unmoderated social media environments, the pilot’s design features—moderation norms, structured prompts, and a facilitative tone—helped maintain deliberative decorum. This finding is important because it challenges deterministic assumptions about online discourse: With appropriate design, governments and institutions can cultivate forums that encourage reflection, mutual respect, and constructive exchange, even on polarizing issues.
Critical Considerations for Building on the Pilot
Representative recruitment. It is essential that care and forethought continue to be put into recruiting a diverse and representative set of participants in these exercises and ensuring that they interact in an environment that is welcoming and equitable. Given its time constraints, the pilot achieved reasonable success in engaging diverse Californians in the areas affected by the fires, but reaching a truly representative mix—across socioeconomic status, geography, race and ethnicity, age, and ability—remains essential for both normative fairness and empirical validity. Future iterations should employ tech-enabled, multipronged recruitment strategies that combine stratified sampling, targeted outreach through trusted community organizations, multilingual materials, and assisted access for digitally marginalized populations. Employing probabilistic elements in participant selection, where feasible, would further enhance the program’s claim to representativeness.
Deeper deliberation for high-stakes questions. A brief, asynchronous, text-based engagement such as the pilot of Engaged California made sense, given many members of this public were displaced and all had experience recent trauma. But although such engagements can surface preferences and identify points of consensus, they are generally insufficient for resolving complex tradeoffs that characterize high-stakes policy decisions. Richer deliberation requires both time and scaffolding: extended conversations (synchronously or asynchronously), phased deliberative processes that move from information-gathering to values clarification to collective judgment, and skilled facilitation to manage conflict and ensure equitable participation. Methods such as deliberative mini-publics, citizens’ juries, or iterative digital platforms (for example, moderated real-time tools that allow small-group breakout and synthesis) can produce more considered judgments. Investing in these modalities will better equip the state to elicit reasoned public priorities and to isolate the normative considerations that underlie technical policy choices.
Better engagement incentives. Equitable participation depends on making engagement feasible for people across economic circumstances. Offering stipends, childcare support, transportation reimbursements, or flexible scheduling for in-person deliberations demonstrably lowers barriers to participation across platforms and signals respect for participants’ time. Stipends in particular are an increasingly accepted practice in deliberative engagement, broadening the pool of participants beyond those with disposable time and resources and fostering sustained involvement in longer-form processes. Public agencies sometimes have limitations on directly compensating individuals, as there were here, so it may be necessary to work with external partners on this priority.
Learning materials and experiences to support deliberation. For participants to engage meaningfully with complex policy issues, they must be equipped with clear, balanced, and accessible background materials. These should include plain-language briefs, visualizations of trade-offs, comparative case studies, and scenario-based exercises that illuminate potential consequences of different policy choices. Multimedia approaches—short explainer videos, interactive data dashboards, and simulated decision exercises—can accommodate diverse learning styles and literacy levels. Equally important is ensuring that materials are available in multiple languages and formatted for assistive technologies, enabling full participation by people with disabilities. Fortunately, AI tools have lowered the technical and cost barriers to translating materials into different languages and viewing formats. Future engagements should build on the success of the pilot to conduct public deliberation in a more information-rich environment.
Clear feedback loops and accountability. Participants need to see how their input has been used; otherwise, trust and future participation will erode. Clear feedback loops—regular updates, public reporting that links specific participant insights to policy recommendations, and documentation of decision-makers’ responses—provide the “receipts” that confirm contributions were heard and considered. Formalizing these loops through publicly accessible dashboards, summary reports, and follow-up sessions helps bridge engagement and action. Moreover, instituting mechanisms for independent evaluation and for tracking policy impact over time will strengthen institutional accountability and support continuous improvement.
The Los Angeles fire engagement report showed a developing connection between public sentiment and government action. Future deliberative exercises run by governments and institutions could even more clearly task participants with a formal role in the process, such as their recommendations serving as the basis for future legislation, and be clear about this pathway for impact at the outset.
Can a large state or nation leverage new digitally enabled tools of democratic participation in a way that is truly additive to existing processes—if not transformative? The Engaged California pilot offers evidence that state-led public engagement can be responsive, civically constructive, and analytically consequential. To translate this promising pilot into a durable, institutionally embedded practice, policymakers in California should prioritize developing better techniques to ensure representative recruitment, invest in methods of deeper deliberation on such high-stakes questions, and provide adequate incentives for participation, robust learning supports, and transparent feedback mechanisms. These steps will not only improve the substantive quality of policy advice but will also reinforce democratic legitimacy by making public input a credible and visible component of governance. Thoughtful scaling of the pilot—anchored in methodological rigor and equity—offers a pragmatic pathway for California to institutionalize deliberative practices that are both inclusive and policy-relevant.
