Ciaran joined Involve in June 2025, working in the Capacity Building & Standards team. Here he is leading and supporting projects including the Local Policy Innovation Partnerships bringing together universities and communities, and Thriving Places, which is exploring how people can take greater ownership of local authority net zero decisions.
Ciaran’s background is as a journalist, investigating the forces that have eroded social cohesion and contributed to people’s sense of powerlessness in the UK and abroad. In more recent years he has switched focus to what might help remedy these challenges.
At the think-tank Demos, he researched this from every angle he could. This included looking at how the public could govern the internet, have more equitable relationships with public services, and be better supported to engage in activism. He also explored the internal democratisation of institutions, through experiments with mass deliberation in the civil service, and what workplace organising meant in the context of online work and volunteering. He also developed expertise in designing and delivering deliberative and participatory processes, including in-person experimentation with the ‘wikisurvey’ tool Pol.is, first popularised by the vTaiwan initiative.
More recently, prior to joining Involve, Ciaran was a senior researcher at the Centre for Deliberation at the National Centre for Social Research, where he led, designed, and delivered a range of participatory and deliberative processes for local government, academia, central government, and the third sector, in areas including trade, public service reform, R&D, the media, and housing. This range deepened his interest in building capacity inside and outside of institutions to embed the processes, skills, structures and cultures needed for effective public engagement in decision making.
Ciaran has long been interested in the broader question of how deliberation and participation connect to our wider associational and reflective lives. This has crystallised in him documenting the world of ‘public philosophy’ – philosophical dialogue facilitated outside of universities – interviewing practitioners at his site, The Public Life of the Mind. He is currently writing a book based on these interviews, to explore what their work can tell us about our opportunities for reflection in our lives today.