Direct Democracy NZ & We All Decide
Independent, but connected.
Direct Democracy NZ is the New Zealand home of a wider idea called We All Decide — the same grassroots system, built by the same people, taking shape community by community in different parts of the world. One concept, many places, each one owned locally.
What this is
One system, taking shape in different places.
We All Decide is a grassroots system for local, direct democracy — built to work anywhere, adapted community by community rather than rolled out as one single product. Direct Democracy NZ is the New Zealand version of it, created by the same people, running under a name that makes sense here.
Other parts of the world will have their own version, their own name, their own communities driving it — but the same underlying system, and the same principles, sit underneath all of them: locally owned, not politically aligned, and answerable to the community running it rather than to any central authority.
Neither “We All Decide” nor “Direct Democracy” is a brand your readers will see. These names describe the underlying system for people trying to understand what it is and where it came from — not something that appears on your site. If your community joins, the forum runs entirely under your own site’s name and identity, exactly as if you’d built it yourself.
Availability
Built for WordPress, and for a specific kind of site.
This is currently available to WordPress sites only, and specifically to sites with a genuine local or democratic-community angle — not as a general-purpose plugin for any site.
If your site already serves a community around local issues, civic participation, or grassroots decision-making, this is built for you. If that’s not what your site is about, it isn’t the right fit at this stage.
It’s free to approved sites. The only costs involved are very nominal fees for the AI research services described below — and using them is entirely optional, never a requirement to take part.
The problem
Local issues rarely get a fair hearing.
National politics and social media dominate public attention, but the things that most affect people’s actual lives — a council rezoning decision, a contested local development, a change to local services — need somewhere a community can genuinely discuss the different sides and reach a shared understanding.
Where local forums exist at all today, they’re isolated, hard to sustain financially, and invisible to each other. There’s no way to see what’s happening two towns over, let alone build a national picture from the bottom up.
The model
Local sites, owned locally. A shared layer, dependent on none of them.
We All Decide is a network of local sites — we call them portals — each one fully owned and run by the community or organisation behind it, connected to a shared national layer.
The relationship is deliberately asymmetric in one important way: the network depends on the local sites — the local sites never depend on the network. If the national layer went offline permanently, every local portal would carry on exactly as before: its own discussions, its own members, its own moderation, its own local ad revenue.
Nothing that matters locally is ever stored only centrally, and nothing local is ever silently controlled from the centre. That isn’t just a nice property — it’s the core trust promise that makes the pitch to an existing, established local forum credible: you’re gaining something, you’re not risking anything.
How conversations connect
Three ways a conversation can travel.
Most discussion on a portal is simply local — an ordinary conversation, fully owned by that site, exactly like any forum today. The network supports two further patterns for when a conversation genuinely is bigger than one town.
The same conversation, running independently in many places at once
A topic like “how should our town handle X” runs as its own, fully independent discussion on dozens of portals simultaneously — each one moderated locally, on its own terms, with nothing live shared between them. The only things that ever flow outward are vote counts, aggregated after the fact, and the finished text of a discussion once a local community has actually closed it. This is how a genuinely national picture gets built without any site ever losing control of its own live conversation.
A single, live, shared national conversation
Rare, and deliberately so — reserved for genuine national set-piece moments where a real-time, single shared thread across many sites is the actual point. This is the one place the network is a live dependency, which is exactly why it’s kept as the rare exception rather than the default.
Getting real issues onto the table
Four steps, a human approving each one.
Standing up a genuinely useful local discussion forum from scratch is a lot of manual work — finding a real, locally relevant, contentious issue; researching the different perspectives fairly; making it presentable. We All Decide uses AI to do the heavy lifting of that process.
Find issues
Surface real, locally relevant, genuinely contentious topics for a given area.
Research it
Build out the different sides of the issue, grounded in real, dated, sourced facts — deliberately never the AI’s own opinion or recommendation, only a factual lay of the land.
Prepare it
Turn that research into something presentable — a title, a visual identity, and a set of discussion threads, one per perspective.
Publish it
Place the finished forum wherever it belongs in the site’s own structure.
Nothing in this pipeline runs automatically without a human choosing to approve it at each stage — and a free practice mode lets a site try the whole flow before spending anything real on it.
Joining the network
Bringing existing communities in.
Standing up a brand-new site is one path in. Onboarding an existing, already-established forum is the other — and it’s a fundamentally different pitch.
An existing forum owner is being asked to add something, not replace anything. The network never touches, writes to, or depends on anything of theirs without explicit, opt-in permission. Read access first, always. Nothing mandatory arrives uninvited. And the value exchange — shared ad revenue, national visibility, eventual access to richer tools — has to be obviously worth it up front.
Sustainability
How it pays for itself.
Two connected mechanisms — both designed so value flows back to the community running the site, not to a central platform.
Local classifieds and ads
Fully owned and run by each site, with zero dependency on the network.
A shared advertising network
National or regional campaigns distributed across participating sites, with a genuine revenue share paid back to whichever site displays them. For a forum that’s never monetised its own traffic, this is often the single most concrete reason to join.
The AI issue-generation pipeline runs on a simple credits system, at a fixed, nominal rate, with a free practice mode — and using it at all is optional, never required to be part of the network.
What’s next
This is the foundation, not the finished thing.
The near-term roadmap is making the AI research pipeline fully real, building out the rare “live national moment” conversation mode, and adding self-service payments. Longer-term, this network is the foundation a much richer deliberative-democracy platform gets built on — once this phase has proven the model and built the community.
