Process organizers

Related Who-Hows

• Enumerate scenarios Process organizers rely on experts or organizers themselves to develop scenarios as a way of informing participants.
• Integrate wider-public Process organizers use mass engagement methods like surveys and submissions to gather opt-in input to informing processes. The outcomes of these engagement programs are usually then shared with those inside the process.
• Represent complexity Process organizers create workflows that optimize for desired outcomes, properties such as concreteness and group agreement can be in tension.
• Facilitate deliberation Process organizers design process workflows and lead participants through them with varying degrees of involvement (light and heavy touch).
• Support collaboration Process organizers design process workflows that intentionally avoid any data conflicts or versioning issues with participant-produced information, while also creating space for the reconciliation of differing views.
• Enable reason-giving Process organizers design workflows that allow for structured individual reflection between moments of discussion or learning.
• Localize participation Process organizers use human interpretation when working with a small number of languages.
• Navigate contexts Process organizers make adaptations to normal methods to account for added complexities.
• Resist manipulation Process organizers anticipate vulnerabilities in processes and do their best to mitigate risk with countermeasures.
• Maximize neutrality Process organizers seek to demonstrate their impartiality by creating governance procedures with strong incentives and review mechanisms.
• Navigate conflict Process organizers will isolate and address conflicting participants to mediate or resolve the issue.
• Handle challenges Process organizers will understand the conditions under which their process breaks, adapting no further than that point where possible.
• Activate learning Process organizers provide information and learning activities to bring participants up to speed on the topic.
• Select participants Process organizers use existing algorithms and tools to implement the normative selection criteria that they set out. 100+ citizens’ assemblies around the world at every level of governance have used these. They take a pool of willing participants and select a final ‘panel’ that adheres to set criteria.
• Support participation Process organizers provide basic process information, additional context, and address accessibility needs proactively or when onboarding participants.
• Simulate participation Process organizers can infer from recorded preferences for new contexts, but these inferences are usually human estimates and not supported by well-documented algorithms.
• Forecast impacts Process organizers may draw on experts or use rudimentary tools to facilitate ‘if this, then that’ exercises.
• Routing and synthesizing Process organizers generally follow structured plans that stitch together data generation and gathering activities with synthesis and understanding activities.
• Evaluate claims Process organisers seek to provide diverse information sources and support participant reasoning with training for careful prompting.
• Inform wider-public Process organizers communicate to the wider public through various media with a focus on conveying qualities that build trust in the process.
• Ensure transparency Process organizers determine their openness to observation and the extent to which they will make process documentation public.
• Make verifiable Process organizers' key details are made directly observable by auditors.
• Include voiceless perspectives Process organizers can ask participants to critically reflect on the hypothetical views of those not present. There are some exercises that prompt participants to consider or even role-play views that are not present in the room (Deliberative Democracy Digest).
• Produce adaptable outputs Process organizers can create workflows that intentionally ask participants to consider adaptability in the development of their outputs, or structure outputs such that they’re inherently adaptable.
• Produce implementable outputs Process organizers create workflows that structure the development of outputs such that they’re implementable.
• Curate context Process designers work with commissioning authorities to source internal materials, sometimes use independent experts for research or request stakeholder input. The responsibility for translating materials into relevant forms varies.
• Tailor designs Process organizers estimate the impact of design decisions informed by anecdotal experiences and their intuitive heuristics and/or opt to follow more established best practices out of fear of process failure, meaning they generate more 'practice as usual' designs regardless of the unique situation.
• Build process workflows Process organizers adapt smaller process components together in logical sequences to facilitate groups of people to reach specified goals.
• Work transnationally Process organizers take principles and processes that work in local and national settings and attempt to adapt them to transnational settings.
• Scale out Process organizers take processes that work for smaller numbers and apply techniques that support the efficient and fair inclusion of more people. There are early explorations into how digital technologies can support this, but real ground-changing work is limited.
• Manage subsidiarity Process organizers address challenges of scale and time by connecting sequences or parallel processes in a predetermined logical manner. Different methods may be explored to engage different groups at different times.
• Optimize run-time Process organizers seek to reduce the time commitment for participants to improve accessibility and reduce costs.
• Manage data Process organizers create bespoke data management systems suited to processes and information formats.
• Evaluate processes Process organizers determine criteria for successful processes and develop indicators for when criteria are met.
• Gather process data Process organizers factor in data capture methods and balance their intrusiveness with the benefits of measuring for success.
• Collectivize data Process organizers work in a decentralized manner to share and coordinate on research and learning.
• Simulate prototyping Process organizers typically rely on real-world experimentation to learn from. Existing examples of simulated trials are primitive agent environments and do not track the complexity of end-to-end processes.
• Integrate operationally Process organizers work with commissioning authorities to create pathways for process outputs to integrate into existing systems.
• Integrate culturally Process organizers work with internal change management teams and executive leadership to embed deliberative practices into organizational culture.
• Integrate transnationally Process organizers coordinate with international governance bodies, regional coalitions, and multi-level governance networks. They map decision-making authority across governance layers to identify optimal integration points.
• Trigger processes Process organizers create some legal, technical, or norm-based threshold for the initiation of a process.
• Navigate ambiguity Process organizers may advise the commissioning authority on how to understand applications to a decision, but most of the time the commissioning authority will simply make a judgement call.
• Enforce accountability Process organizers typically have limited recourse to enforce accountability, often relying on creating incentives to encourage accountability.

Related Processes / Systems