How to push to boundaries of deliberation
Help experiment and innovate with tools at the frontier of deliberation.
It can be difficult for practitioners to keep up with developments. This map provides a curated list of relevant tools, techniques and case studies to enable the deliberative democracy community to keep track of the frontier. With community input, we can improve its comprehensiveness; you can use the ‘contribute’ button to make suggestions and flag missing tools.
This page includes sections for: High impact product gaps, low-hanging fruit and
The biggest gaps to close
Here you can find experimental examples trying to tackle the aspects of running deliberations that are most difficult. Whether that’s due to resourcing, time constraints or scale. These experiments might have lessons you can adopt or collaborators you can contact.
Activate learning
Urgent Informedness
Ability for diverse participants to efficiently and effectively learn relevant information, such that they can actively apply their learnings in the process.
Bind legally
Urgent Bindingness
Ability to make outputs enforceable through known and viable legal structures and mechanisms (e.g. regulation that requires authority to implement or seriously consider the outputs).
Bind technically
Urgent Bindingness
Ability to ensure the relevant technical systems act in directed ways (e.g., via model alignment, control, cryptographic enforcement of outputs, physical limitations, etc.). Caveat: Irrevocable direct binding to outputs should generally be implemented with checks and balances.
Build process workflows
Urgent Adaptability
Ability to construct process workflows that achieve intended outcomes in given contexts.
Commit effectively
Urgent Commitment
Ability to commit to deliberative outputs and therefore, set up exit costs in case of commitment drift (e.g. reputational damage or stakeholder backlash).
Enumerate scenarios
Urgent Informedness
Ability to generate lists of likely scenarios, including edge cases, in which decisions will be applied, to help participants better understand the issue space.
Evaluate processes
Urgent Measurability
Ability to measure desired outcomes to compare methods, processes and systems.
Forecast impacts
Urgent Informedness
Ability to effectively and easily model complex systems, to help participants understand the potential impacts of different decisions.
Gather process data
Urgent Measurability
Ability to gather process data in a cheap, reliable, accessible manner.
Reach participants
Urgent Representativeness
Ability to reach potential participants (e.g., to mitigate biases around self-selection, who is reachable, etc.).
Simulate prototyping
Urgent Learning Speed
Ability to run trials that are good enough to learn from, and fast enough to enable rapid testing of new methods and process comparisons.
Help refine the product gaps
Many capabilities could be improved with the use of new tools or products. We’ve specified some here but the list is certainly not exhaustive and would benefit from being tailored to the needs of practitioners. You can help by making suggestions for missing products or contributing edits to what exists.
AI Assurance Infra (Bias, Accuracy, etc.)
Urgent AI/ML
Infrastructure for providing guarantees around bias and accuracy, control over training data usage, comprehensive logging/evaluation, and offline operation capabilities for any integrated AI system.
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.
AI Manipulation Detection System
Urgent AI/ML
Real-time AI-enhanced monitoring and detection system that identifies manipulation attempts, whether AI-generated or human-orchestrated, across all stages of deliberative processes: from recruitment and selection gaming to astroturfing in discussions, coordinated voting patterns, and output tampering.
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.
Automated Recruitment Tool
Urgent AI/ML
AI-powered recruitment system that automates demographic targeting, campaign creation, multi-channel outreach, and participant selection using real-time census data and advanced selection methodologies.
Babelfish
AI/ML
Real-time translation infrastructure for multi-language deliberative processes that captures all audio and written inputs (microphone, documents, handwritten notes) and provides instantaneous translation to each participant’s selected language through on-screen display or in-ear devices.
Context Mapper
Urgent AI/ML
Tool automatically generates comprehensive context analysis, process planning inputs, and accessible participant briefing materials with visual aids by processing uploaded information (PDFs, transcripts, emails, recordings) and conducting interviews with stakeholders.
Decision Impact Forecasting and Modeling
Urgent AI/ML
Interface where participants input policy proposals and receive impact models, showing effects on both targeted and related outcomes with confidence intervals, assumptions, and interactive exploration capabilities.
End-to-end Assembly Software
Participant-facing interface for democratic processes and organizer-facing management system (combining CRM, materials distribution, and participation tracking).
Multimodal Tailored Learning Support
Urgent
Tool that helps participants understand context and information for deliberative processes through multiple formats (text, audio, video, VR, games), adapting to individual learning styles and measuring understanding non-intrusively.
Opinion Mapper
Urgent AI/ML
Tool that connects to recording devices and data sources to instantly analyze participant contributions, creating real-time visualizations of views, consensus areas, and divisions on any topic throughout deliberative processes.
Personal Deliberation Partner
Personalized chatbot available to each participant before, during, and after deliberative processes, designed to guide them through the process, ask probing questions, provide relevant information, and help participants explore their own thoughts and understand diverse perspectives.
Process Design Simulation Sandbox
Urgent AI/ML
Simulation environment that tests deliberative process designs by running multiple simulated processes, and predicting outcome distributions to show how design choices impact results.
Research Observatory
Research hub that coordinates deliberation data, standardized evaluations, and researcher-practitioner collaboration, providing secure access to historical process data, optimizing limited participant research time, and developing comparative evaluation frameworks for the field.
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.
Sortition Proof Layer
A cryptographically verifiable layer that wraps around existing sortition systems, to generate publicly auditable proofs that participant selection was both random and representative, without revealing participant identities. Works as middleware between participant databases and any selection algorithm.
Highlight promising examples
Help improve the coverage of this map by suggesting missing resources and concrete examples of processes that demonstrate capabilities in action.
Table
resources
Not more than 1
Build process workflows
Urgent Adaptability
Ability to construct process workflows that achieve intended outcomes in given contexts.
Commit effectively
Urgent Commitment
Ability to commit to deliberative outputs and therefore, set up exit costs in case of commitment drift (e.g. reputational damage or stakeholder backlash).
Enforce accountability
Accountability
Ability to create consequences for accountability failures.
Enforce decisions
Bindingness
Ability to make outputs enforceable through known and viable mechanisms (e.g. formats, structures, or procedures that can actually plug into how organizations already make and implement decisions).
Ensure transparency
Legibility
Ability for the process to be open to the public (where possible given privacy considerations).
Handle challenges
Robustness
Ability to withstand changing contexts and less-than-ideal conditions.
Make verifiable
Legibility
Ability for integrity of the process to be verified and audited.
Manage data
Process Speed
Ability to manage, route and surface data produced by the process throughout the process.
Navigate ambiguity
Bindingness
Ability to ensure that, given potential ambiguity of decisions, the authority takes actions as close to the intended ones as possible.
Optimize run-time
Process Speed
Ability to run time-minimal processes subject to performance and reliability thresholds.
Produce adaptable outputs
Substantiveness
Ability for final outputs to be adaptable to changing contexts while retaining clear intended outcomes and specificity.
Produce implementable outputs
Substantiveness
Ability to produce outputs in immediately actionable forms (e.g. policies, budgets, AI constitutions, town plans etc.)
Support collaboration
Deliberation
Ability of participants to collaboratively work together to develop policies and other complex artefacts.
Track implementation
Accountability
Ability to monitor the implementation of the process and upholding of commitments to act on outputs.