How to help democracy keep pace with AI
Help create the tools and infrastructure deliberative democracy needs for the age of AI.
What tools, products, and infrastructure do we need to make democratic processes better and more accessible? This page is intended to outline the way that product and infrastructure builders can have the most impact, including critical context needed to ensure that what is built will get used.
This page includes sections for:
High impact
Some products, like those that help create the infrastructure for high-fidelity process simulations or build necessary AI assurance infrastructure, would massively speed up the overall ecosystem significantly upon completion. AI assurance infrastructure, for example, would enable practitioners to utilize new technology with the knowledge that their processes are protected against possible mistakes or biases.
AI Assurance Infra (Bias, Accuracy, etc.)
Urgent
Infrastructure for providing commitments 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 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
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 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-powered recruitment system that automates demographic targeting, campaign creation, multi-channel outreach, and participant selection using real-time census-like data and advanced selection methodologies.
Babelfish
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
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
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.
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.
Process Design Simulation Sandbox
Urgent
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
Urgent
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.
Low-hanging fruit
Innovation in deliberative tooling is significantly underexplored, resulting in large amounts of low-hanging fruit. These projects aren’t necessarily small but they’re certainly tractable compared to some of the bigger suggestions highlighted on the map. All of these tools could be rapidly tested and used by deliberative practitioners to support the quality and integrity of their processes. Cards also provide recommendations for how to get started and who to work with.
Context Mapper
Urgent
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.
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.
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.
Smart Templates (AI-supported real-time format support)
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.
Urgent products
There is a lot of work to do but in order to move fast enough to have the right tooling available at the right time, some projects need to happen first. This is a list of those tasks. Take the example of the Process Design Simulation Sandbox. If we could test process designs with a certain degree of fidelity, this would allow us to very quickly experiment and innovate in silica, while also allowing us to run process demonstrations to support advocacy and derisking. The other projects here support similar flywheels or critical process dependencies.
AI Assurance Infra (Bias, Accuracy, etc.)
Urgent
Infrastructure for providing commitments around bias and accuracy, control over training data usage, comprehensive logging/evaluation, and offline operation capabilities for any integrated AI system.
AI Manipulation Detection System
Urgent
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 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-powered recruitment system that automates demographic targeting, campaign creation, multi-channel outreach, and participant selection using real-time census-like data and advanced selection methodologies.
Context Mapper
Urgent
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
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.
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
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.
Process Design Simulation Sandbox
Urgent
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
Urgent
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.