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Facilitate deliberation
Ability to develop appropriate process workflows and support mixed groups to reach successful outcomes.
How this is performed now...
- Process organizers Process organizers design process workflows and lead participants through them with varying degrees of involvement (light and heavy touch).
- Citizens' assembly organizers Citizens' assemblies organizers have facilitation teams that lead the assembly members through a mostly predetermined workflow, focused on ensuring the overall task and outcomes are met within the allotted time. They do their best to be impartial while helping to maximize the processes' efficacy.
Related Resources
Practice
Facilitating Deliberation: A Practical Guide
A comprehensive MosaicLab resource for public engagement and deliberative democracy covering practical step-by-step advice on planning, designing, and delivering deliberations face-to-face and online. Written by directors Kimbra White, Nicole Hunter, and Keith Greaves drawing from 39 deliberative...
Product
Stanford Online Deliberation Platform
A video discussion tool facilitating structured and equitable conversation with automated moderation helping participants form speaking queues, timed agendas, and real-time analytics. Built on Deliberative Polling methodology allowing unlimited participants to deliberate simultaneously in small g...
Product
Frankly
An open-source, video-based discourse platform by Harvard's Applied Social Media Lab facilitating meaningful conversations through integrated discussion guides, flexible facilitation options, and intelligent group matching creating balanced breakout discussions. Operates on the principle that con...
Product
ThinkScape
An AI-powered platform facilitating large-scale group conversations among up to 250 people simultaneously using proprietary Swarm AI and Hyperchat AI technologies. The platform divides large groups into smaller discussion subgroups then weaves conversations together into coherent deliberation, co...
Research
Artificial Intelligence in Deliberation: The AI Penalty and the Emergence of a New Deliberative Divide
Survey experiment with 1,850 German participants identifying a significant "AI penalty" where participants showed reduced enthusiasm for AI-facilitated deliberation and rated AI-enabled discussions lower than human-led alternatives. Individual attitudes toward AI shaped responses, with those perc...
Related Product gaps
AI Online Facilitator
Urgent AI/ML
AI agent that provides real-time group facilitation for deliberative processes, managing participation equity, topic focus, conflict resolution, and shared understanding across multiple simultaneous breakout groups.
AI In-Person Facilitator
AI/ML
AI agent that provides real-time group facilitation for in-person deliberative processes, managing participation equity, topic focus, conflict resolution, and shared understanding across multiple simultaneous breakout groups.
Smart Templates (AI-supported real-time format support)
AI/ML
System for helping ensure that the outputs of a task are in the right form, e.g., by evaluating content’s fit to a specified template and instruction, and giving feedback as comments, suggested edits, or through chat.
Related goals and research questions
Goal: Digital tools that enhance facilitation quality and capacity.
How can digital tools assist human facilitators to more effectively facilitate deliberations?
Urgent
How to develop an AI facilitator that is attentive to power imbalances, adaptive to group dynamics and effective in guiding groups towards successful outcomes?
Urgent
What are the effects of AI facilitation on public perceptions, group dynamics and deliberative quality?
Urgent
Can AI systems identify their own biases and reasoning errors more reliably than individual humans can identify their own cognitive biases when making sense of inputs?
Urgent
How can delibtech tools expand the space of policy scenarios and considerations in a transparent and fair way?
Urgent
Goal: Preserve human elements that make deliberation legitimate and valuable
How much authentic human value is lost at each level of AI involvement (AI note-taker vs. AI facilitator vs. AI co-deliberator) and where is the steepest drop-off in the value-cost curve?
Urgent
If 'doing the work' of synthesizing and clustering is more valuable than having an AI do it, do participants benefit equally from 'doing this work' or does it privilege those with more skills and stamina?
Urgent