Democracy isn’t static—it’s something we build together. In this Behind DXC interview, Ana Serrano shares the origin story of DemocracyXChange and why the next chapter of democracy starts with participation, power, and dialogue

Ana Serrano is one of the co-founders of DemocracyXChange (DXC) from its earliest days. She is now President and Vice-Chancellor of OCAD University in addition to being an educator, creative producer in digital media, and leader in cultural policy and civic innovation. We sat down with Ana to hear the origin story of DXC, how her Filipino heritage shapes her commitment to democracy, and what she’s most excited about for DXC26 and the future of DemocracyXChange.

What motivated you to start DemocracyXChange?

Ana: At first, we imagined DemocracyXChange as a civic tech or technology-and-democracy conference, because that conversation was not really happening in Canada yet. But as we started to build it, it quickly became clear that it could not just be about good tech. It had to be a much bigger conversation about power: who has it, who does not, how movements build it, and where it actually sits, whether federally, provincially, or locally.

So DemocracyXChange became about more than tech and democracy. It became a space to think about how democratic practice evolves beyond the ballot box and how people can help shape that evolution.

We did not start with a neat answer or a fixed model. We just knew that democracy is a verb, that it asks something of us, and that part of the work is helping people build a sense of agency within it. At the beginning, we were still figuring out what that looked like in practice. In many ways, the early programming was instinctive: we convened the conversations that felt most urgent, necessary, and missing.

DXC Co-Founder Ana Serrano at the first DemocracyXChange Summit in 2017

How does your connection to the Philippines inform your work at DemocracyXChange and your passion for democracy?

Ana: I’m Filipino. I grew up in the Philippines and came to Canada when I was ten. My parents were part of a generation of relatively privileged, progressive Filipinos who were part of the activist movements when Marcos declared martial law.

What I remember clearly is that in the beginning it was not obvious to everyone that he was authoritarian. The Philippines was seen as the Tiger of Asia and people thought the country had enormous potential for growth. But very quickly it became clear that Marcos was not a good guy. Many of the people who resisted were people my parents knew, and some of them were killed as activists. I grew up with that understanding of how quickly democracy can crumble.

The Philippines never really fully recovered from that. I remember when Aquino was assassinated. I had just come back from a camping trip in Temagami and saw the newspaper headline that he had been killed on the tarmac. Experiences like that stayed with me.

Watching the rise of Duterte years later felt less like a familiar authoritarian script and more like seeing authoritarianism become brazenly mainstream. As a Filipino, I was paying close attention to what was happening there. And because I had spent much of my career in digital media, something about the online dynamics stood out immediately. Duterte seemed to be everywhere on Facebook, promoted by influencers and accounts in ways that felt unusual at the time. I didn’t yet have the language for what we now call coordinated disinformation campaigns, but it was clear that something new was happening in the digital sphere.

That experience gave me a kind of pattern recognition. When you watch one country start to move in a certain direction, you begin to recognize the signals elsewhere much earlier.

That perspective is part of why global voices have always mattered at DemocracyXChange. We invited Maria Ressa, for example, before she became a Nobel laureate, because her work documenting how digital platforms were being used to shape political narratives in the Philippines was already offering important lessons about the future of democracy.

DXC has always tried to look across different contexts and ask what they can teach us, not just about one country, but about democracy more broadly.

DXC intentionally brings voices across the political spectrum and sectors, including artists and creatives, into dialogue. Why is that important?

Ana: From the beginning, DemocracyXChange was guided by three core ideas: it would be cross-partisan, politics-positive, and grounded in the belief that democracy is a verb.

What we meant by that is that democracy is not just a system we inherit. It is a set of practices we need to learn, inhabit, and keep remaking together. It’s something people can shape. Its structures are not static; they can evolve.

That is also why we never saw democracy as belonging to one ideology or political camp. Democratic systems are something we co-create across partisan differences, across institutions, and with the public.

In that sense, DemocracyXChange has always been a design exercise. We are interested in how democratic systems can work better, who gets to redesign them, and what principles should guide that work.

And once you see democracy as something designed and redesignable, it becomes clear why artists and designers belong in the conversation.

What are you most excited about for DXC 26? And looking ahead, how do you see DXC evolving over the next few years?

Ana: For DXC26, I’m especially excited about the framing of an economy that serves democracy. For a long time, we’ve been told to think about it the other way around: that democracy should serve the economy. The emphasis has so often been on building systems that maximize productivity and growth, as though economic expansion is the ultimate goal.

But what happens if we flip that logic? What if the real goal is a healthy, pluralist democracy, and the economy is something we design to create the conditions for that democracy to thrive? That is the shift in thinking I’m most excited for people to explore.

Looking ahead, it’s clear that democracy has become a much more urgent public conversation. But DemocracyXChange has been doing this work for seven years. We started engaging these questions well before they became as prominent as they are now, and I think that gives us a strong foundation as more people across the country begin to grapple with them. I see the next phase for DemocracyXChange as growing into a truly national platform, one built through the collaborations and partnerships we have been organically stewarding over the years.