From grassroots climate movements to organisational governance, Thomas Kemps works at the intersection of facilitation, participation, and democratic practice. In this interview, he reflects on how interfaces shape collective action, how sociocratic principles redistribute power within groups, and how emerging tools like AI might transform participation.
Early Experiences of Participation
Nica: I already did this with Alin, and because you’ve been involved with INTERFACED both as a practitioner, someone working with civic participation, and as a collaborator working with our research team, I structured the interview in two parts.
First, I’m going to ask you about your experiences and observations as someone who has worked with participatory processes and communities. Basically, the reasons you ended up with INTERFACED as a fellow. Then I’ll ask some meta-level questions about your work with us in INTERFACED and about how research and practice intersect in projects like this.
How does that sound?
Thomas: Great.
Nica: Good. Let’s start with something similar to what we discussed when we did the interview for your fellows position, but in a different context. Can you tell me a bit about how you first became involved in participation or community work, and what kinds of projects have most shaped how you think about participation and democracy today?
Thomas: Yes. I’ll go quite far back, but then move quickly to more recent things.
When I was a child, and I still am an introvert, I struggled a lot with participating and playing games with other kids at school. I realised quite early that I was very curious about social dynamics. I remember that, at some point, when I was around twelve, I thought: what if I print some money and distribute it in my classroom, and then just observe what happens?
Of course, nothing really happened, because you can’t just start a parallel economy like that. But for me, looking back, that was a hint that I had always been interested in how people govern themselves.
So I studied European Studies in Maastricht, then continued with Political Science in my master’s. Quite quickly, I moved from studying institutional governance at the European level, how the European Union works, to being more interested in how grassroots participation works.
I think the key moment for me was when I joined a couple of actions with Ende Gelände, the German movement that mainly does occupations of open-pit coal mines in Germany, and nowadays also in other countries.
For me, that was transformative. I still remember the image of this huge black hole in the ground, this enormous open-pit mine, and then thousands of activists running down and literally occupying the coal mine.
What struck me was seeing these thousands of activists organising without a central body or a leader. They were using affinity groups, consensus decision-making, facilitated assemblies, and all sorts of methods like that. It felt like: wow, this is what a colourful and well-organised mass of people can achieve, and this is the kind of impact they can create if they get organised well.
After that, I became an activist in Extinction Rebellion, started learning about facilitation and decision-making methods, and then gradually made it my job. I started learning about sociocracy, participatory processes, and so on. So that is really how it all started: I was first a participant myself, and then I moved more into a facilitator or enabler role.
Nica: Enabler in a good sense.
Thomas: Yes, exactly.
Nica: It is funny, because in the US “enabler” as a noun often has a negative meaning, someone who helps another person continue a harmful habit, like drinking or addiction.
Thomas: Oh wow, okay. Then maybe I should explain what I mean.
I mean it in the sense that I am not the one giving people power. People already have the power to create change. What I can do is support them with methods, practices, training, and continued support so that they can express their own power. That is what I mean by “enabler.”
Defining Interfaces in Participation
Nica: That makes sense. So, as you know, our project is called INTERFACED, and before the fellows came on board there were a lot of quite robust discussions among the partners and work packages about what an interface actually is, especially an interface between citizens, in a broad sense, and decision-makers.
From your perspective as a practitioner, what is an interface? What does it actually look like in practice?
Thomas: At one point, I thought interfaces were mainly digital interfaces. Years ago, when I was at university, I studied a lot of what the Five Star Movement was doing, and for me that was an interface: how do we design digital experiences so that people can create something together, whether that means creating shared meaning or collective action?
But once I joined actual movements, I realised that there are not only digital spaces like online forums, instant messaging platforms, and so on. There are also physical spaces. In Extinction Rebellion, for example, there was a lot of care about how to design an assembly, a local assembly, a people’s assembly, and how to design people working together in a local group or a national chapter.
So for me, interfaces are really about how we design digital and physical spaces so that people can collaborate, exchange, and create meaning together.
Designing Multi-Stage Participatory Processes
Nica: Wonderful. Based on your work, whether from Italy or elsewhere, can you give one or two concrete examples where participation actually worked, where citizens genuinely influenced a decision, and what made that process work, in your opinion?
Thomas: A recent example is from last year, when I supported Extinction Rebellion in Italy in designing and leading a process to review their second demand.
Extinction Rebellion internationally had, for years, a second demand around reaching net-zero emissions and stopping biodiversity loss by 2025. Of course it is now 2026, so the movement had to face the fact that one of its core demands had become obsolete. The question was: what do you do when one of the demands that holds a decentralised movement together no longer fits reality?
The decision in Italy was that the whole movement should be involved. Similar processes happened in other national chapters as well.
So we designed a process through which the several hundred active activists in Italy could share their opinions, and we could track, roughly, how much agreement or disagreement there was around different alternatives and different possible directions for the movement, given how much the political, social, and environmental context had changed.
We used Polis for that, and it was the first time XR Italy had used it. Afterwards, a group synthesised all of those opinions into a proposal, and then we used a simpler form to gather consent on that proposal, with a defined threshold — a quorum, basically. For example, at least 200 activists had to respond for the decision to count.
So this was a recent example of how a grassroots organisation can handle an internal participatory process for something it really cares about.
Nica: What do you mean by “rough consensus”?
Thomas: Actually, I probably phrased it wrongly. The first phase was more about sense-making: understanding where people stood, what patterns were emerging, and so on. The second phase, the actual decision-making moment, was proper consensus, where people could say: I agree, I agree but with reservations, I abstain, or I veto.
So yes, the first phase was sense-making, and the second was consensus.
Hybrid Interfaces and Collective Sense-Making
Nica: Going back to the question of what an interface is: would you say that a process with multiple stages can itself be an interface? Or is an interface one specific stage, one medium, one technology, digital or physical, that facilitates the transmission of ideas and agency toward power?
Thomas: It is tricky, because for me interfaces are somewhat intangible. Even this Zoom call is an interface, right?
So in the example I just described, I would say the process had multiple interfaces. It used different interfaces depending on the phase of the process and on what we wanted to achieve at that specific moment.
That whole process took more than six months. It required a group to design the process. There were informational calls before the sense-making phase started. We invited a scientist, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion UK, and a political scientist to explain what had changed since Extinction Rebellion was founded. Then there was Polis for the sense-making, then the consensus phase, and throughout the whole thing there were different tools and different modes of interaction.
Each stage had different interfaces, and each one allowed people to interact differently. In a Zoom call with fifty activists, for example, people could ask clarifying questions. Polis was something new for XR Italy; it mapped how people felt about certain statements and created a kind of map of opinion groups.
That was actually quite funny, because you could also start seeing which local groups had more affinity with anarchist tendencies, for example, because they were consistently expressing themselves as a distinct opinion group compared with groups in bigger cities or other places.
And there is one more thing that might be relevant here: every local group also had in-person assemblies to discuss these issues before activists expressed themselves individually online. So it was not just an online process lasting six months. There were also in-person moments that helped people get the information they needed and form an opinion.
Nica: That leads well into another question. One of the other people I interviewed, I think it was Valentin from FOSDEM, thought that the best interfaces were hybrid: a combination of online and in-person. His point was that online work can be much more efficient, but knowing each other in person builds trust and community, and that in turn makes the online work much more effective. What do you think?
Thomas: I totally agree.
Personally, I work mainly in fully remote teams. But one thing I think remote work cannot really provide is the kind of conviviality and informality that comes naturally with office work, in-person gatherings, events, or meetings.
Once we finish this meeting, we close Zoom and we are in two different parts of the world. But after an in-person meeting, like a plenary assembly of a local group, there is all that informal social life: let’s get a beer, let’s eat something together, let’s chat.
That creates deeper connections. At the same time, online spaces make things possible that would never have happened otherwise. We probably would never have met in our lifetime without them. So yes, I agree: hybrid models work best.
Sociocracy and Scalable Governance
Nica: Specifically regarding the kinds of activism you have been involved in: in many participatory processes, citizens can give input, but they are not actually part of governance. How does a more sociocratic approach change that dynamic? And do you think sociocratic structures can scale beyond small communities?
Thomas: In the past, I was very fond of direct democracy, the idea that everyone should be able to vote directly on certain matters. And at the very local, very small scale, I still think that should be true. I should be able, for instance, to decide what the street I live on should look like.
At the same time, there is a principle that is hard to move away from: listening in many, deciding in few.
For example, when a local government runs a consultation process and says: we want to do this project, but we want to hear from our citizens first, I think that is a good practice, because it means they are acknowledging that they do not have the full picture and that they should listen to those who will be affected.
So for me, that is one important way institutions can improve.
What I have always found very powerful in sociocracy is that it creates a space where everyone who works together can also govern together. I often translate sociocracy as: those who work together, design together.
In a workplace, a community, or a grassroots movement, I do not want merely to execute decisions imposed from above. If I take care of a certain part of the work, and I am responsible for it, then I also want to have authority over that part. I want to be part of how that piece is designed, not just how it is executed.
Because sociocracy today is mainly used as a governance system for organisations, I often try to bring some of its principles into looser participatory processes. For example, taking a fifty-person assembly, splitting it into smaller groups with a facilitator and a note-taker, speaking in rounds, following the pattern of understanding the issue, exploring options, and then making a decision together by consent.
We did something like this a couple of years ago for the youth network of Slow Food. Slow Food International wanted to listen to the youth network so that, a few months later, there could be some sort of youth manifesto on food, climate, rights, and related issues.
So the central body of the organisation listened to the youth network through a process that did not just gather 200 people in one big room and say, “Who wants to speak?” Instead, everyone had a way to contribute.
For me, that matters a lot, because as an introvert I would always struggle to speak in a large open assembly. And I think the same goes for many others, women, younger people, more reflective people, people of colour, and many others who may find open, unstructured participation more difficult.
Youth Perspectives
Nica: That makes total sense. Speaking of youth participation: what kinds of issues, or forms of participation, seem to resonate most with younger people in your experience?
Thomas: Through the interviews I have been doing, I have noticed that compared to just a few years ago, when climate breakdown was the issue, the fear that things would go really badly if we did not act, focus now seems to be shifting.
There is still a lot to do, of course, and I do not mean that climate no longer matters. But more and more, the feeling seems to be that climate breakdown is not the root problem, but an effect of something deeper.
And what lies underneath it, in the way younger people are talking about it, is the economic and cultural system itself: capitalism on the one hand, and patriarchal society and all that comes with it on the other. So the analysis seems to be deepening. Climate is still there, but it is being understood as part of a wider systemic crisis.
AI, Ethics and Accessibility
Nica: As you know from our discussions on the platform, we are integrating questions about AI into all the interviews, partly because it came up organically in the FOSDEM interviews and partly because Sirin wants to incorporate it into the data presentation she will do in Cluj.
Some people think AI could make it easier for citizens to interact with institutions — for example by summarising policy discussions or helping people draft proposals. Others worry about ethics, privacy, and the ways technology can centralise power.
So from your perspective, what role, if any, could AI play in civic participation in the future?
Thomas: I think both sides are true.
At the moment, and I do not think this is going to stop soon, we mostly see AI being used by those already in power to strengthen and centralise their power even more.
On the other hand, when I think about participatory processes, inside organisations, communities, local groups, networks, and so on, I always recommend having facilitators. A facilitator is someone who designs or at least watches how people are contributing and tries to make sure that everyone can participate actively.
What I think we will increasingly see is AI acting as a kind of facilitative agent.
For example, it might notice the people who are contributing less to a conversation on a platform, or even at an in-person event, and encourage them to contribute. It could say: these are still the open questions, or ask why someone has not yet spoken. It could also help with synthesis. One of the big problems in large-group participatory processes is that you often get a lot of divergent thinking. AI could help highlight where there is already convergence, and what issues still need to be explored more deeply.
It might even suggest that a specific expert be invited to clarify a topic.
So I think we will see more of that, and I hope we do.
Nica: So if I understand you correctly, AI could assist meaningfully with facilitation and synthesis, but not with the things that require human judgment. Is that right?
Thomas: Hopefully, yes.
Let me put it this way: what I increasingly think matters, in sociocracy and in other participatory methods, is not so much “wisdom” — which is often associated with elders, experience, and so on — but intuition.
I am not even sure I like the concept of wisdom very much anymore. I like intuition more.
And I think intuition is one of the things human beings still have, at least for now, and AI does not really have, because AI works with probabilities. So yes, that is where I would draw an important line.
Nica: That is really interesting. I have not heard anyone put it that way before, but it makes sense to me.
If AI were integrated into facilitation or mediation, are there safeguards or design principles you would want to see in practice?
Thomas: I am not a major AI expert, but I have colleagues working with it. One of them, whom I interviewed, is working on AI for accessibility in a museum. What I learned from that work is that you can build something that is universally good if you begin from the needs of people with specific impairments, visual, hearing, physical, and so on. In other words, accessibility needs to be a core design principle.
Then, of course, there is the issue of extractivism in a broad sense: extracting data from users. AI was trained from the beginning through the illegal extraction of books and articles, so we already started from a non-ethical position. And now it is even worse because it is in the hands of big corporations.
So training AI on people’s data raises major concerns, and then there is also the extraction of physical resources, the energy, water, and infrastructure required by data centres.
So for me the key principles are accessibility, data ethics, and the broader material footprint.
Democracy as Technology and the Research – Practice Gap
Nica: I want to shift gears now and move to the more meta-level interview questions, about our project and the research-practice relationship. As someone who works directly with these kinds of processes, do you think the goals of the INTERFACED project, what we are trying to understand, are in sync, or not in sync, with what you see happening in real participatory processes?
Thomas: I have asked myself that question too.
I see positively the fact that an institution, in this case the European Union, or the European Commission, wants to understand how people participate, or would like to participate, so that this might inform how the democratic system improves over time.
Because democracy is itself a kind of technology.
Nica: What do you mean when you say that democracy is a technology? That is a very interesting phrase.
Thomas: I mean that democracy should not be understood as the final system, the one stable system that replaced autocracy or something else and is now finished.
The reality is that there are many different democracies, and that democracies can change and improve over time, or become worse, as we are seeing now.
If we compare a democratic system to software, then just as software can be changed, by rewriting code, replacing something, adding a feature, democracy can also be redesigned. We can add something new. We can implement, for example, a citizens’ assembly. We can imagine replacing one political chamber with a body of randomly selected citizens.
Even changing the quorum for a referendum is changing the democratic system. It is editing the code of the software we use to collaborate and make decisions in large groups like nation-states.
So in that sense, I think it is good that institutions are trying to understand how people want to participate.
At the same time, civil society is still often one step ahead of institutions. It is important that institutions listen, observe, and integrate what people are already doing in practice.
If you look at the different waves of social movements over the last twenty-five years, the No Global Movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados, Ende Gelände, Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter, there has not been much listening, observation, and integration from institutions in terms of understanding how people want to participate in today’s society and politics.
And I think that contributes to this sense of detachment, this distance between institutions and citizens.
Nica: Have there been moments since you came on board the project where the research perspective has felt especially useful for you as a practitioner and activist?
Thomas: Yes.
Just running the interviews, just sitting for an hour and listening to people talk about how they experience themselves inside collectives, how they see themselves as part of a larger whole, how the relationship between the individual and the collective works in terms of identity, practice, ethics, tools, and so on, that has been very interesting in itself.
Nica: Given your academic background as well as your practical one, do you think there are aspects of participatory work that academic scholarship either misunderstands, overlooks, or does not ask the right questions about?
Thomas: It is a bit difficult for me to answer, because I have been out of university for a few years now. But there are two things that come to mind.
The first goes back to my master’s thesis, which was on populism. When I started reading the academic literature, I was not fully satisfied with what I saw. I quickly realised there was a dominant liberal understanding of populism in academia: that populism is generally not a good thing, even if it can sometimes point to something not working in the liberal-democratic system.
The approach I ended up taking in my thesis was closer to a post-Marxist understanding of populism. It recognised that populist movements can be problematic, but it also tried to look at the emancipatory or innovative possibilities that might exist, especially in relation to left populist movements.
So that taught me that academic common sense about a phenomenon may need to be questioned. Instead of simply asking, “Is this bad?” we might also ask, “Is there something happening here that is actually politically interesting?”
The second thing is more recent. My partner has just started a PhD on deliberative democracy from a transfeminist and decolonial perspective. We were talking the other day because she had met with another researcher, and they were discussing how much conversation there is, or is not, between more critical branches of research and mainstream approaches to deliberative democracy.
So I think there is still a gap in how certain participatory practices are critically assessed.
Designing Interfaces That Show Impact
Nica: I think you already answered this partly, but I have one more question. Based on both your own experience and your experience in our project, what should researchers or practitioners pay attention to when designing interfaces between citizens and decision-makers, or citizens and other citizens, in ways that genuinely help voices be heard and amplified? In a way, it is almost a user experience design question.
Thomas: Yes, and it is a very interesting one.
What I often see from institutions is something like: “We want to hear your opinion. Here are a few options. Thank you for your time. Bye.”
Maybe that was enough forty years ago. Nowadays, people want to see their impact.
And I think that has something to do with the fact that political parties are much weaker than they were fifty years ago. Maybe parties used to function as the interfaces through which people could participate in politics. They no longer do that in the same way.
So whenever there are interfaces for participation today, I think people are more than willing to use them, but they want to see whether their voice is actually heard, and how it is integrated into action.
How to do that is extremely difficult. It is hard to think about how the current system can reform itself in order to better listen to people. And because this is so difficult, many participatory processes and movements end up happening outside the current institutional democratic system, or in opposition to it.