RFP: Interoperable Deliberative Tools

Purpose: To support new and existing tools for deliberation and governance, and to promote more interoperability between such tools.

Scope: Digital tools that go beyond basic voting and commenting, and provide new capabilities to the governance ecosystem—which may only be one step of a larger deliberative governance process. The processes these tools enable may be used for online community governance, AI governance and alignment, cooperative governance, citizen town halls or assemblies, or other kinds of institutional policy-making or decision-making.

Interoperability requirement: as a key condition of the grant, all grantees must support interoperability by incorporating a process to publish their data in a flatfile format such as JSON, JSON-LD, or CSV as well as a process to import data into their tool from a flatfile. This requirement is described more fully in the draft interoperability specification and rationale accompanying this RFP.

Funded projects

We awarded approximately $200,000 to 14 projects, out of 51 applications received. Additionally, seven project teams whose projects were not selected have been invited to attend the cohort meetings, supported by a small stipend. We will also be conducting an in person workshop in San Francisco for all of the cohort members to convene and collaborate.

Power Ranker - Power Ranker is a technique for producing probability distributions (“budgets”) over sets of items using pairwise-preference inputs. The goal is to enable large groups to collectively allocate resources. It uses the “power method” for finding eigenvectors, hence the name.
Constituency Listening - A data analysis and visualization tool to scaffold transparency, justification, and rigor in voice-to-decision processes for community decision makers.
Iswe Foundation - Digital platform for scaling global community deliberation. Supports community scale deliberations globally, aggregates data, and curates insights for local and global impact.
Moral Graph Elicitation - Repurpose tool built specifically for OpenAI Democratic Inputs into a standalone, open-source product usable for arbitrary topics (like Pol.is).
Open MicroPublishing - Enable researchers to micropublish — from their lab notebooks — evidence-based knowledge graphs that can interoperate with evidence-informed deliberations in online platforms
The Deliberative Canvas - Enables importing of qualitative data from deliberative tools onto a digital canvas for dynamic data visualizations - enhancing deliberative processes via human exploration and discovery of (hidden) patterns/relationships.
CSV Interoperable Exports/Imports - CSV interoperable exports/imports for participatory objects like Assemblies, Meetings, Debates, Initiatives, Proposals and Participatory texts on the Decidim platform
Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab) - A collective dialogue system to scale online deliberation and build group recommendations based on common ground.
Policy Craft - An online platform that supports collaborative, bottom-up policy development through case-grounded deliberation.
Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform - Platform used by cities for the voting phase of Participatory Budgeting.
Global Brain Algorithm - An algorithm to debunk misinformation.
MAPLE - MAPLE standardizes the public testimony process for the Massachusetts state legislature, provides a public archive, and fosters a deliberative space centered on legislation.
Talk to the City (T3C) - Extending T3C to map areas of common ground and controversy, and suggest root causes of disagreement
Pairwise - Pairwise was designed to make voting to distribute RetroPGF simple and fun. Pairwise is an open-source, off-chain voting dapp (like Snapshot) that streamlines community signaling by letting users select between just two options and then aggregating their choices into a quantifiable result.
Second Dimension - Project exploring the application of AI-powered systems to support collaborative investigations, harnessing the power of collective intelligence in high-stakes environments to collectively solve problems.
Ize - Ize is a collective attention and action platform. Ize allows groups to co-create and evolve collaborative workflows that span across tools, organizational boundaries, and online identities.
Harmonica - AI-powered chatbot that streamlines group deliberation by synthesizing opinions submitted through 1:1 dialogues into predictable output. https://harmonica.chat/
Swarmcheck - Swarmcheck is computer assisted argumentation platform with reusable, structured argumentation and decision support (e-Delphi, fact-checking weighting, voting, comprehension etc.) Improves critical thinking 2x better than academic courses on critical thinking.
Ethelo - Ethelo empowers groups to solve complex problems, by collaboratively analyzing all possible scenarios to find outcomes that will maximize support while also minimizing inequality.
Evocracy decision-making protocol - Efficient and scalable decision-making protocol based on a hierarchical selection and integration process.
Interoperable Co-operative Governance - Repurposing commonly-used collaborative and development tools into an interoperable dashboard that streamlines democratic decision-making processes for small organizations.

People

Daniel Carr - Technical lead
Ellie DeSota - Non-technical cohort lead
Nitin Mariserla - Project manager
Eugene Leventhal - Program manager
Josh Tan - Advisor
Aviv Ovadya - Advisor
Amy Zhang - Advisor
Colin Megill - Advisor

Key documents

the full RFP (includes link to application form)
the full specification
the application
the review rubric

Key dates

July 15, 2024: Grant decisions announced
July 31 2024, Kickoff date
- Optional: call every two weeks for the cohort of projects to have a check-in point
October 25, 2024 (tentative): Projects report back (open source repo + blog post or paper).
- Projects may not be finished by then, but must do public sharing by then.
- While the call every 2 weeks is optional, grantees are expected to join at least two calls (3 month mark and 6 month mark) to share progress
January 31, 2025 (tentative): Projects report back.

About Metagov

Metagov is a laboratory for self-governance on the internet. The mission of Metagov is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. Our research encompasses both theoretical and applied research, including the development of software and technical standards. On top of our research, we also build research networks and bring together communities through our tools, experiments, and events.