What is the best democracy ROI
Fund the development of democratic processes most capable of tackling our toughest challenges.
Where can funding help improve key democratic capabilities the most? One goal of this map is to support foundations, philanthropists, and governments to identify where the marginal dollar can be put to the best use, by identifying the capabilities limiting deliberation’s quality, impact, scale, and speed. In particular, increasing deliberative process quality and speed is crucial in order to unlock use in the most critical contexts.
This page includes sections for:
Concrete products and infrastructure
These are products and infrastructure that have already been partially scoped, and that we have identified as clear needs. Please reach out if you're interested in funding these and we can help route you to people already working on implementation where they exist.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
What needs to be done first
Resolving a few key bottlenecks has the potential to massively speed up the overall ecosystem. This is a list of goals that, once met, would improve the maturity of their parent capability but only for the capabilities that we’ve tagged as the most urgent because of either their importance in speeding up the rate of improvement (simulation and measurability) or because they fill critical gaps in getting processes to the point of “good enough” for near-term use cases (resisting manipulation and reaching participants).
Deliberative processes that can be tested and refined before implementation with real participants
Urgent
Designers who understand the validity boundaries and appropriate use cases for deliberative process simulation
Urgent
Participants who are able to accurately understand the potential impacts of their decisions.
Urgent
Deliberations that can be captured faithfully and unobtrusively with full participant consent and ethical protection
Urgent
Long-term effects of participation that can be tracked on individuals and their networks
Urgent
Metrics of quality of deliberation that can be measured in real time, enabling facilitators to make adaptive process interventions
Urgent
Preference transformation and participant learning that can be tracked throughout the process
Urgent
Participants who learn as much as possible in the time available.
Urgent
Tools that track the quality of individual and group learning within the deliberative process
Urgent
Process outcomes that can be empirically measured and compared across contexts, processes and systems, enabling evidence-based improvements
Urgent
Recruitment strategies that accommodate poor databases for identifying and accessing people locations with no mail access or poor access to the internet.
Urgent
Response rates that enable selection algorithms to accurately select panels that represent the whole population by mitigating the impacts of self-selection biases.
Urgent
There are cheap and efficient ways of recruiting participants that can account for differences in response rates to different types of invitation methods (mail phone door-knocking etc).
Urgent
Assembly designs that are robust to both internal and external manipulation attempts.
Urgent
Manipulation attempts that can be reliably detected and prevented across different stages of the assembly process.
Urgent
Post-hoc verification that can establish that outcomes were not unduly influenced.
Urgent
Ensure that commitments are sufficiently adaptable to changing circumstances
Urgent
Ensure that commitments made by commissioning authorities to act on process outputs stick
Urgent
Internal barriers that are removed within organizations to be able to make and act on commitments
Urgent
Deep understanding of when, if at all, simulation can be helpful.
Urgent
Deliberative processes that can be tested and refined before implementation with real participants.
Urgent
Simulations that are accurate enough to be relied upon when decisions are needed rapidly (e.g. seconds minutes hours).
Urgent
Governments that can legally bind themselves to the decisions of a deliberative process
Urgent
Legal frameworks that provide definitions of different degrees of bindingness with timelines and enforcement triggers
Urgent
Private organizations that can legally bind themselves to the decisions of a deliberative process
Urgent
Low-hanging fruit
Democratic innovations are significantly underfunded, resulting in lots of low-hanging fruit. This is a list of the capabilities that we’ve rated with a “low” level of maturity and a “high” level of opportunity, meaning that these aren’t the biggest or most complex projects but are tractable and important contributions to improving processes. For example, something like “Curate Context” would significantly improve the way processes address the right problems and present the right information to participants, not to mention reduce the costs for commissioners, but wouldn’t involve massive engineering challenges.
Represent complexity
Ability for final outputs to be nuanced, concrete, decisive, and comprehensive.
Reach participants
Urgent
Ability to reach potential participants (e.g., to mitigate biases around self-selection, who is reachable, etc.).
Manage data
Ability to manage, route and surface data produced by the process throughout the process.
Produce adaptable outputs
Ability for final outputs to be adaptable to changing contexts while retaining clear intended outcomes and specificity.
Curate context
Ability to provide complete context to participants, including things like background information, subject matter fundamentals, relevant considerations, tradeoffs, and possible options.
Handle challenges
Ability to withstand changing contexts and less-than-ideal conditions.
Make verifiable
Ability for integrity of the process to be verified and audited.
Navigate ambiguity
Ability to ensure that, given potential ambiguity of decisions, the authority takes actions as close to the intended ones as possible.
Navigate conflict
Ability to address, resolve and navigate conflicts that emerge within the process.
Include voiceless perspectives
Ability to fairly include the perspectives of those that are not represented in the process, including people who are not present (future generations, young people or other representation constraints), and non-human entities (natural phenomena or animals).
Build process workflows
Ability to construct process workflows that achieve intended outcomes in given contexts.
Integrate wider-public
Ability to provide those not in the room deliberating with opportunities to constructively and fairly contribute input into the process.
Optimize run-time
Ability to run time-minimal processes subject to performance and reliability thresholds.
Manage subsidiarity
Ability to host decentralized processes simultaneously or sequentially and productively distill them into one central process.
High impact niches
Many actors are working on the same obvious problems, leaving other key challenges comparatively neglected. This list contains capabilities that we’ve designated either “high” or “extreme” when it comes to neglectedness, and “minimal” or “low” in terms of maturity. There are reasons why some of these challenges have been neglected. Some call for entire teams to tackle a complex problem, like simulation and forecasting, while others are a little less glamorous and require specific knowledge of the processes and systems they pertain to, like output implementability, gathering process data, or activating learning in participants.
Simulate prototyping
Urgent
Ability to run trials that are good enough to learn from, and fast enough to enable rapid testing of new methods and process comparisons.
Forecast impacts
Urgent
Ability to effectively and easily model complex systems, to help participants understand the potential impacts of different decisions.
Gather process data
Urgent
Ability to gather process data in a cheap, reliable, accessible manner.
Bind technically
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.
Activate learning
Urgent
Ability for diverse participants to efficiently and effectively learn relevant information, such that they can actively apply their learnings in the process.
Represent complexity
Ability for final outputs to be nuanced, concrete, decisive, and comprehensive.
Reach participants
Urgent
Ability to reach potential participants (e.g., to mitigate biases around self-selection, who is reachable, etc.).
Enumerate scenarios
Ability to generate lists of likely scenarios, including edge cases, in which decisions will be applied, to help participants better understand the issue space.
Manage data
Ability to manage, route and surface data produced by the process throughout the process.
Produce adaptable outputs
Ability for final outputs to be adaptable to changing contexts while retaining clear intended outcomes and specificity.
Curate context
Ability to provide complete context to participants, including things like background information, subject matter fundamentals, relevant considerations, tradeoffs, and possible options.
Handle challenges
Ability to withstand changing contexts and less-than-ideal conditions.
Make verifiable
Ability for integrity of the process to be verified and audited.
Navigate ambiguity
Ability to ensure that, given potential ambiguity of decisions, the authority takes actions as close to the intended ones as possible.
Navigate conflict
Ability to address, resolve and navigate conflicts that emerge within the process.
Simulate processes
Urgent
Ability to simulate the interactions and decisions of actors (e.g., participants, stakeholders, facilitators, experts), subprocesses, or entire processes (e.g., for rapid process iteration and learning).
Integrate transnationally
Ability to integrate with transnational and interorganizational systems.