How to use this map
This Democratic Capabilities Gap Map is intended to track the work required to improve representative deliberative democratic processes (see the about page for details). It is backed by a database with relationships between: Dimensions, Capabilities, Resources, Goals, Research Questions, and Product Gaps .
This map is categorized by the high-level dimensions that describe key outcomes of deliberative processes, for example, that participants become informed. Within each dimension is a subset of capabilities that contribute to delivering these outcomes, for example, that one can curate the context needed to sufficiently inform participants. Not all of these capabilities will be relevant to every deliberative process, but this is intended to be a relatively comprehensive set of the capabilities likely to be necessary.
How do we decide what to include in the map?
The AI & Democracy Foundation team manually curated the content, and it goes through a round of review before publication, including with subject matter experts where needed.
Many contributors across a variety of fields and backgrounds provided suggestions and expertise.
All of the core content was manually written and curated by subject matter experts; AI has been used for quality control, copy editing, and web development.
How did we make these assessments?
Several key contributors drew on their deep experience with deliberative democratic processes across governments, AI organizations, public utilities, and peacebuilding. We estimated the threshold representing “good enough” across key dimensions and capabilities such that stakeholders would sufficiently buy-in and that processes would be capable of successfully operating in high-stakes scenarios.
They are subjective assessments — we don’t have consensus on them even within the AI & Democracy Foundation. They are intended as starting points for debate, not definitive judgments. We think making an opinionated call on these ratings is useful for all stakeholders and in the spirit of Cunningham’s Law, we welcome feedback.
How did we choose this rating system? (And what is imperfect about it?)
We want the ratings to support two uses:
- Roadmapping: Understanding where we are now and what needs to happen to get where we want.
- Prioritizing: Making decisions about what needs to be done first.
To do this we’ve adopted common assessment criteria from other similar endeavours:
- Maturity: How good is current practice compared to what we think is required?
- Importance: How much would the overall quality of deliberative processes suffer if this capability did not mature?
- Neglectedness: To what extent is this capability lacking resources and attention?
- Opportunity: To what extent can additional resourcing (people, attention, $, etc.) improve maturity?
- Transnational: How well can this currently work for a global/transnational process?