Nivek K Thompson

Nivek Thompson is the founder and Executive Director of a boutique consultancy Deliberately Engaging. Deliberately Engaging provides services to government and non-government organisations, primarily in designing and recruiting participants for engagement processes. We focus particularly on recruiting mini-publics and similar bodies for short and long-term consultations.

Nivek recently completed her PhD looking at how democratic innovations could improve democracy. The title of her thesis is Deliberative mini-publics: institutional design and the quality of democracy. Whilst her research focused on a particular type of democratic innovation (citizens’ juries) the framework she developed to consider the design of these processes is applicable to other participatory initiatives.

Nivek was the lead developer for the Leading Deliberative Democracy and Doing Deliberative Democracy courses at the University of Technology Sydney and provided support to the development of the Masters level unit Co-design and Deliberative Engagement for the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at Canberra University.

Nivek is an Associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra and the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney. She is a published author on democratic innovation, has worked on the OECD working party on institutionalising deliberative processes, and initiated and produced the podcast series Facilitating Public Deliberations. Nivek is also the producer and host of Real Democracy Now! A Podcast, where she interviews thought leaders in democratic innovation from around the world.