2026.08.02 · KEIO MITA CAMPUS

Digital Democracy Summit

HOSTED BY KEIO KGRI PRANCE × DIGITAL DEMOCRACY 2030

The future of democracy, built together.

Putting citizens' voices to work through technology, to move democracy forward — the people doing that work, gathered from Japan and beyond for a single day, in one room.

Sun · August 2, 2026

Keio Mita · Kita-kan Hall

~200 seats · free · lottery if oversubscribed

LIGHT BEYOND THE OPEN DOOR · 開かれたドアの先に輝く光

Digital democracy gathering in Tokyo, 2025 — FROM 2025

Last year, in one room.

Scenes from the 2025 gathering in Tokyo — practitioners, politicians, and technologists, across one day.

TOKYO · 2025

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Why this summit

Practitioners, in one room.

Civic-tech / democracy-tech startups, local-gov, all parties, academia.

Open program.

Part of the program is selected via open CFP. Propose yours by June 22.

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Speakers

Ken Suzuki

Project Researcher, The University of Tokyo

Born in Nagano, Japan, in 1975. Suzuki received his B.S. in Physics from Keio University in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Academic Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at The University of Tokyo in 2009. Prior to his current roles, he served as a Chief Researcher at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) at the International University of Japan and as a Fellow at the Tokyo Foundation's Virtual Institution. In 2012, he co-founded SmartNews Inc. His areas of expertise are complex systems science and natural philosophy. He is the author of Nameraka na Shakai to Sono Teki (The Smooth Society and Its Enemies) and the co-translator of Andy Clark's "Being There": Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again.

SEIRA YUN

CEO of Socious, Host of Tech for Impact Summit, Founder of Impactism

Founder and CEO of Socious, whose Socious Report uses AI to help companies with their sustainability disclosures. He advocates Impactism — making impact, not money, the measure of a life — and hosts the invitation-only Tech for Impact Summit. He founded Socious in 2021 after working with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and UNHCR, holds a master's degree in social innovation from the University of Cambridge, and is an impact angel investor.

Hal Seki

Code for Japan Representative

Representative Director of Code for Japan. As a policy entrepreneur and civic hacker, he launched sinsai.info during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and established Code for Japan in 2013. He promotes government DX in municipalities across Japan, serving in roles such as Senior Expert at the Digital Agency, Chief Innovation Officer for Kobe City, and Chief Digital Service Fellow for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. He leads citizen-participatory social problem solving.

Shutaro Aoyama

Columbia University

Born in 2003. A student in the School of Engineering at Columbia University. Selected as an IPA MITOU Creator (2020), and a fellow of both the Masayoshi Son Foundation and the Tadashi Yanai Foundation. At Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL), he conducts research and development on AI-mediated communication. In parallel, he works on deploying deliberation-support technology in society through Team Mirai and the Digital Democracy 2030 project.

Ken Shibusawa

CEO, Shibusawa and Company, Inc. | Chairman, Commons Asset Management, Inc. | CEO, &Capital, Inc. Born in 1961, he moved to the United States in 1969 with his father's job transfer and graduated in chemical engineering from the University of Texas in 1983. After working at the Japan Center for International Exchange, he earned his MBA from UCLA in 1987. He worked in markets at U.S. investment banks including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, joined the hedge fund Moore Capital Management in 1996, and headed its Tokyo representative office from 1997. In 2001 he went independent and founded Shibusawa and Company, Inc.; in 2007 he founded Commons Inc. (renamed Commons Asset Management, Inc. in 2008, where he became chairman); and in January 2023 he established &Capital, Inc. as CEO. He leads a management school on "The Analects and the Abacus" (Rongo to Soroban). In June 2025 he was appointed director of Kyushu Financial Group and outside director of Seven Bank. He is a senior advisor to Brunswick Group and Bain & Company Japan; a board member of Keizai Doyukai (Japan Association of Corporate Executives) and lead chair of its Middle East & Africa Committee; an advisor to the President's Office of the University of Tokyo; and chairman of NHK's International Broadcasting Programming Council. He also serves as co-chair of Triple I for Global Health, head of GSG Impact JAPAN, a member of the Financial Services Agency's Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance, and a member of METI's Health and Productivity Management study group. His books include "100 Lessons from Eiichi Shibusawa," "SDGs Investment," "33 Teachings of Eiichi Shibusawa for an Unbreakable Spirit," and "The Analects and the Abacus and the SDGs for Bankers," among others.

Kazuki Jinnouchi

Deputy Representative Director, Code for Japan

After completing graduate studies at Waseda University's Graduate School of Political Science, he joined NEC. From 2013 to 2015 he was seconded to the Reconstruction Agency, serving at the town office of Namie, Fukushima. He joined Code for Japan in 2017 and is now its Deputy Representative Director, working on tool development and analysis to counter mis- and disinformation.

Maiko Ichihara

Professor, Hitotsubashi University

Maiko Ichihara is a Professor in the Graduate School of Law and the School of International and Public Policy at Hitotsubashi University, Japan. She is also the director of the Democracy Advocates at Risk program and serves on the steering committees of the East Asia Democracy Forum, Japan Factcheck Center, International Coalition for Democratic Renewal, and Indo-Pacific Platform for Universal Values. Throughout her career, she has undertaken research on international relations, democracy support, Japanese foreign policy, and influence operations. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University. Her publications include: “How to Tackle Disinformation in Japan: Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war,” in Jessica Brandt, et al., Impact of Disinformation on Democracy in Asia (Brookings Institution, 2022); “Japanese Democracy After Shinzo Abe,” Journal of Democracy 32-1 (2021); and Japan's International Democracy Assistance as Soft Power: Neoclassical Realist Analysis (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).

Sho Miyazaki

Visiting Researcher at Waseda University

Sho Miyazaki is a visiting researcher at the Waseda Institute of Political Economy and an incoming Ph.D. student in Public Policy at Harvard University. His research focuses on voting and political representation. Drawing on political economy, he uses quantitative methods to study how institutions and new technologies shape political choices. His current projects examine how AI chatbots recommend parties to voters, how digital voting systems affect participation and strategic behavior, and whether legislative redistricting advantages particular parties. Before Harvard, he was a predoctoral research fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He holds an LL.B. in Political Science from Keio University.

Shinta Nakayama

NextInt.inc CEO

Shinta Nakayama is the CEO of NextInt Inc., an engineer-entrepreneur working across machine learning, data science, generative AI, corporate DX, and game development. Within Digital Democracy 2030, he maintains "Kouchou-AI," an open-source broad-listening system that visualizes citizens' voices. His publications include *Machine Learning at Work* and an introduction to "Information I," Japan's high-school informatics curriculum, written for working professionals.

Yusuke Hayashi

Researcher・Artificial Life Institute,

Yusuke Hayashi is Rsearchear at Artificial Life Institute. He specializes in collective intelligence and AI alignment. He proposed the concept of "collective free energy" within the framework of Collective Predictive Coding (CPC), and, together with Audrey Tang, who led vTaiwan, and other collaborators, has advocated for bidirectional human–AI alignment. His research centers on developing novel approaches to AI alignment and on models of multi-agent cooperation. Prior to his current role, he worked at the Bank of Japan, where he was engaged in the compilation and analysis of official statistics as well as macroeconomic analysis.

西田尚史

公益社団法人政策推進機構代表理事

公益社団法人政策推進機構代表理事。東京大学法学部卒、大学院大学至善館MBA修了、東京大学大学院法学政治学研究科博士課程在籍。ビジネスの実務の傍ら、個人のライフワークとして政治資金収支報告書のデータベース化に5年間取り組み、2025年にデータベース構築に特化したシンクタンク「政策推進機構」を設立（2026年公益認定）。完全無償・非営利の「政治資金収支報告書データベース」（https://political-finance-database.com/）を運営し、政治の透明性の基盤づくりに取り組む。

Ogura Masataka

Digital Democracy Builders

2016年北海道大学公共政策大学院修士、2023年東京都立大学大学院経済学修士。2016年経済産業省に入省し、マクロ経済・中小企業分析、デジタル政策、再エネ政策、地域政策を担当。2022年株式会社ビズリーチに入社し、人材管理SaaSの企画業務を担当。2024年10月から株式会社PoliPoliに入社しマルチステークホルダーによる政策共創を推進。デジタル民主主義2030コアループプロジェクトでPolicyチームリードとして政策的な視点で有識者を交え企画を推進。

Yukino Baba

Associate Professor, The University of Tokyo

Yukino Baba is an Associate Professor at UTokyo. Her research interests are in Human–AI Decision Making, aiming to improve decision making for individuals and groups. She develops AI techniques that identify trustworthy input, spotlight overlooked but important perspectives, and provide guidance for fairer decision making. She also investigates how AI advice and explanations shape human decisions. Through AI techniques, her goal is to help people respect diverse viewpoints and reach outcomes that more participants can accept.

Takahiro Anno

Member of the House of Councillors, Leader of Team Mirai, AI Engineer, and Science Fiction Writer.

Member of the House of Councillors, Leader of Team Mirai, AI Engineer, and Science Fiction Writer. He graduated from Kaisei High School and the University of Tokyo, where he studied under Professor Yutaka Matsuo, chair of the Cabinet Office’s AI Strategy Council. After working at the Boston Consulting Group, Anno founded BEDORE Inc. (now PKSHA Communication), an AI chatbot company, and later co-founded MNTSQ, Ltd., a legal technology startup. Both ventures focused on transforming social systems through digital technology. In 2024, he ran for Governor of Tokyo on a platform centered on digital democracy, receiving over 150,000 votes. In May 2025, he founded the political party Team Mirai. He was elected to the House of Councillors (proportional representation) in the same year, achieving the threshold for official party status with over 2% of the national vote. Anno continues to advance initiatives that connect policy with the realities on the ground, leveraging AI-driven civic participation and fostering two-way, interactive communication between citizens and politics.

Dominique Chen

Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University

Born in Tokyo in 1981. Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Information Studies. After working as a researcher at the NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] and co-founding Dividual Inc., currently Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University. Director of the interdisciplinary research team Ferment Media Research, which designs Nukabot, a fermenting nukadoko (rice-bran pickling bed) robot that enables conversation between humans and microbes, while exploring the relationships among technology, humans, and nonhumans through the metaphor of fermentation. Authored and co-authored books include Mirai wo Tsukuru Kotoba [Words That Weave the Future: Bridging Our Mutual Unintelligibility] (Shinchosha), Commons to Shite no Nihon Kindai Bungaku [Modern Japanese Literature as Commons] (East Press), and Nazodoko [The Riddle Bed: Editorial Techniques for Fermenting Thought] (co-authored with Seigow Matsuoka, Shobunsha). Supervised Japanese translations include Sandor Ellix Katz's Fermentation as Metaphor (O'Reilly Japan) and Rafael A. Calvo and Dorian Peters's Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential (BNN).

More speakers to be announced after the CFP curation closes.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS · CLOSED

CFP is closed. We'll announce the next CFP after the program lands.

Back to home

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VOLUNTEER

Help build it with us

Reception, interpreting, A/V, photography, hospitality. One slot is enough.

RECEPTION

Stay for the reception.

18:45–20:15 · South Annex Cafeteria · paid. Keep the conversations going with speakers and fellow attendees.

PRESS

Covering the summit?

Media are welcome. Press attendance is by advance registration.

DATE

Sun · August 2, 2026

VENUE

Keio Mita · Kita-kan Hall

RECORDING

Per-session consent

CAPACITY

~200 · free · lottery if oversubscribed

RECEPTION

18:45–20:15 · paid · sign-up

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FAQ

If your question isn't here, send it via the contact form — we read every one.

What does it cost?

Free. ~200 seats. If we receive more registrations than seats, we'll run a lottery. We can't accept walk-ins due to venue capacity.

Who can attend?

Anyone working on or curious about digital democracy — practitioners, civic-tech founders, local-gov staff, academics, engineers, journalists, students.

Will it be recorded?

Sessions with speaker consent will be recorded and posted. We'll confirm your photo/video consent at registration.

Are travel and lodging covered?

Not by us. International speakers are coordinated separately.