Engaged California Program

Engaged California

“This is a town hall for the modern era — giving Californians a real voice in shaping how government responds and improves.”

— Governor Gavin Newsom

Overview

Engaged California is a first-in-the-nation digital democracy initiative launched by the State of California to improve public engagement, rebuild trust, and integrate lived experience directly into government decision-making. Designed as a “modern town hall,” the program brings Californians into structured, civil, and policy-relevant conversations on complex public challenges.

After an intensive global search, Ethelo was selected as the primary engagement platform to power the Engaged California program, which focused on two foundational engagements:

LA Wildfire Recovery — a multi-phase public engagement enabling fire survivors and impacted communities to set priorities and co-develop recovery actions.
Government Efficiency — a statewide engagement inviting California state employees to surface and prioritize ideas to improve how the government works.

Together, these engagements demonstrate how deliberative digital engagement can operate at scale — across emotionally charged public crises and inside large public institutions — while producing actionable, decision-ready insights

Key Metrics

LA Wildfire Recovery

Engagement Phases: Agenda Setting → Action Planning
Timeline: March–May 2025 (Agenda Setting phase)
Community Contributions: 1,300+ public comments synthesized into policy options
Agenda Topics Rated: 10
Action Options Evaluated: 19
Final Output: Top-ranked community recovery actions

Government Efficiency

Participants reached: 247,000+ California state employees
Engagement Type: Deliberative idea generation and prioritization
Scope: Statewide, cross-agency

Challenges

High-stakes, high-emotion context: Wildfire recovery required trauma-aware, respectful engagement that could accommodate lived experience without devolving into adversarial debate.
Urgency and policy relevance: Input needed to be gathered quickly while recovery planning was actively underway.
From input to decision: Thousands of qualitative contributions had to be transformed into clear priorities and actionable options.
Civility at scale: The platform needed safeguards to support constructive dialogue and avoid social-media dynamics.
Institutional engagement: For government efficiency, the challenge was engaging employees meaningfully — not as a suggestion box, but as a deliberative process that could inform real change.

Solution

Ethelo’s platform was used as the core deliberative engine within Engaged California, supporting both public-facing and internal government engagements.

Key elements of the solution included:

Structured deliberation and prioritization: Participants evaluated topics and options using consistent criteria, enabling clear aggregation of public priorities.
Phased engagement design: For wildfire recovery, agenda setting informed a subsequent action-planning phase, creating a transparent feedback loop.
Moderated, anonymous participation: Participants engaged under a civility pledge, supporting respectful dialogue in emotionally charged contexts.
Scalable qualitative synthesis: Large volumes of open-ended input were transformed into analyzable data to inform policy options.
Accessibility and inclusion: The platform was designed to support broad participation across diverse communities and state employees.
Rapid deployment: Engagements were launched quickly to align with active policy windows.

Ethelo worked in collaboration with the Office of Data and Innovation (ODI) to ensure engagement design aligned with California’s digital democracy goals and operational constraints.

Process & Phases

Engagement 1: LA Wildfire Recovery

Phase 1 — Agenda Setting
Participants rated the importance of ten wildfire recovery topics, including environmental cleanup, wildfire prevention and accountability, infrastructure restoration, climate resilience, and community recovery.

Results clearly surfaced the issues residents viewed as most urgent, with multiple topics receiving “very important” or “essential” ratings from over 80% of participants.

Ethelo’s platform was used as the core deliberative engine within Engaged California, supporting both public-facing and internal government engagements.

Phase 2 — Action Planning

Ethelo and ODI synthesized more than 1,300 public comments into 19 concrete recovery action options. Participants then evaluated and prioritized these options, resulting in a ranked set of community-endorsed recovery actions to inform state and regional decision-makers.

This phased approach ensured that recovery actions were directly grounded in community-identified priorities.

Engagement 2: Government Efficiency

Engaged California’s second major initiative invited state employees to help improve government effectiveness.

Employees were asked to:

Share ideas for improving how government works
Engage with others’ ideas through structured deliberation
Help surface priorities that could inform operational and policy reforms

The engagement treated employees as both public servants and Californians — recognizing their lived experience navigating government systems from the inside.

Results

Wildfire Recovery

Clear, ranked priorities reflecting the lived experience of fire-impacted communities
A policy action plan endorsed by the Governor
Demonstrated ability to host civil, constructive engagement during a crisis
Decision-ready outputs aligned with active recovery efforts

Government Efficiency

A scalable model for engaging a large public workforce in deliberative problem-solving
A structured alternative to traditional employee surveys or idea boxes
A foundation for ongoing “inside-out” government innovation

Analysis Highlights

Agenda-setting clarity: Priority ratings created a shared understanding of what mattered most before proposing solutions.
Qualitative synthesis at scale: Thousands of comments were transformed into structured insights and actionable options.
Civility and trust: Participants engaged respectfully, reinforcing confidence that online public engagement can be constructive when well designed.
Policy relevance: Outputs were explicitly designed to inform real decisions, not merely collect feedback.

Conclusion

Engaged California illustrates how structured digital engagement can move beyond consultation toward shared problem-solving and decision-making. By combining agenda setting, deliberation, and prioritization, Ethelo enabled California to listen at scale — and to turn that listening into action.

The project offers a replicable model for jurisdictions seeking to strengthen democratic legitimacy, improve policy outcomes, and rebuild trust between governments and the people they serve.