Broad Listening

Publishing a book on broad listening

Broad listening is the practice of collecting and visualizing the voices of many different citizens so that they can inform decision-making. While practical examples grew rapidly in Japan in 2024–2025, there was no material where one could learn the concepts, tools and use cases in one place.

The Digital Democracy 2030 community had accumulated a lot of knowledge, but it was scattered across members' heads and meeting notes, and there was concern that it would be lost unless someone pulled it together. Led by Shinta Nakayama, the community gathered its participants' knowledge and is writing and publishing a book that systematically explains the background, concepts, cases and practice of broad listening.

The Japanese edition is scheduled to be released by Impress. The manuscript is public on GitHub in Japanese and English, and a website for reading the manuscript, broadlisteningbook.com, is available.

History

• 2025-08-13 Shinta Nakayama (tokoroten) proposed the book to a publisher and negotiated writing it under CC-BY
• 2025-10-15 The proposal was formally accepted and writing began on GitHub
• 2025-12-03 Takahiro Anno contributed a foreword
• 2026-02-09 Audrey Tang provided an endorsement
• 2026-04-24 Thanks to Luke Closs, the website for reading the manuscript was launched
• 2026-05-04 The manuscript was completed and entered the publishing process; a CC-BY-NC version was branched off

Related resources

• About this Book / この本について (Japanese)
• Problems with the book? / 本の問題を報告する (Japanese)
• Broad Listening Book Wiki (Japanese)

Related projects

Kouchou AI is one of the open-source tools that Digital Democracy 2030 develops to support broad listening.