Practice | Democratic Capabilities Gap Map

How to push the 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 what is happening at the frontier. With community input, we hope to improve the map’s comprehensiveness. You can use the “contribute” button to make suggestions and flag missing tools.

This page includes sections for:

Cutting edge resources on the hardest problems
Help complete the map
Important efforts to improve evaluations

Cutting edge resources on the hardest problems

Here you can find experimental attempts at tackling certain challenging aspects of running deliberations. These experiments might contain lessons you can adopt or introduce collaborators to contact. We’ve filtered the capabilities by their maturity, selecting for those that score “low,” so there is some level of capability that you can adopt. We have also focused on areas where there are resources in the database.

Viewing Capabilities. Filtered by: Maturity being "Low" ; and resources having at least 1 items .

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Gather process data

Ability to gather process data in a cheap, reliable, accessible manner.

Dimension: Measurability

Activate learning

Ability for diverse participants to efficiently and effectively learn relevant information, such that they can actively apply their learnings in the process.

Dimension: Informedness

Represent complexity

Ability for final outputs to be nuanced, concrete, decisive, and comprehensive.

Dimension: Substantiveness

Evaluate processes

Ability to measure desired outcomes to compare methods, processes and systems.

Dimension: Measurability

Reach participants

Ability to reach potential participants (e.g., to mitigate biases around self-selection, who is reachable, etc.).

Dimension: Representativeness

Manage data

Ability to manage, route and surface data produced by the process throughout the process.

Dimension: Process Speed

Produce adaptable outputs

Ability for final outputs to be adaptable to changing contexts while retaining clear intended outcomes and specificity.

Dimension: Substantiveness

Curate context

Ability to provide complete context to participants, including things like background information, subject matter fundamentals, relevant considerations, tradeoffs, and possible options.

Dimension: Informedness

Navigate ambiguity

Ability to ensure that, given potential ambiguity of decisions, the authority takes actions as close to the intended ones as possible.

Dimension: Bindingness

Navigate conflict

Ability to address, resolve and navigate conflicts that emerge within the process.

Dimension: Robustness

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).

Dimension: Representativeness

Integrate wider-public

Ability to provide those not in the room deliberating with opportunities to constructively and fairly contribute input into the process.

Dimension: Informedness

Bind legally

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).

Dimension: Bindingness

Manage subsidiarity

Ability to host decentralized processes simultaneously or sequentially and productively distill them into one central process.

Dimension: Scalability

Integrate culturally

Ability to integrate deliberation in the organizational culture of an authority.

Dimension: Integration

Scale out

Ability to accommodate large numbers of people into a process whilst retaining high deliberative quality.

Dimension: Scalability

Help complete the map

Help improve the coverage of this map by suggesting missing resources and concrete examples of processes that demonstrate capabilities in action.

Viewing Capabilities. Filtered by: Category being Process ; and resources having no more than 1 items .

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Important efforts to improve evaluations

We need to be able to measure and evaluate our processes so that we can improve them. To do this, researchers and practitioners need access to quality data, hands-on experience to design better data gathering practices, and feedback on what is most important to benchmark on.

Viewing Capabilities. Filtered by: Dimension being Measurability, Learning Speed .

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Simulate prototyping

Ability to run trials that are good enough to learn from, and fast enough to enable rapid testing of new methods and process comparisons.

Dimension: Learning Speed

Gather process data

Ability to gather process data in a cheap, reliable, accessible manner.

Dimension: Measurability

Evaluate processes

Ability to measure desired outcomes to compare methods, processes and systems.

Dimension: Measurability

Collectivize data

Ability to make data open and easily available to researchers.

Dimension: Learning Speed

Simulate processes

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).

Dimension: Learning Speed