Engineering for deliberative democracy

Just as the architecture of a meeting hall affects whose voice can be heard, the design of our digital tools provides and forecloses certain political possibilities

Recent deliberative democracy projects have shown us that humans are remarkably adept at collaboration, empathy, and collective decision making, even with complete strangers. In this time of physical distancing, can we use networked digital tools to continue, or even expand these projects? Could they take us even further, into a future where deliberative democracy “scales up” globally?

One of the keys to implementing this in a truly democratic way will be a vigilant connection between engineering decisions and political values. We need to think carefully about 1) how and when to use different tools, and 2) how we build them. In this post, I focus on this second question: How do we proactively engineer FOR the needs of deliberative democracy? Below, I outline a few areas where engineering decisions will need to be made and mention some concerns and possible solutions.

Algorithms

An algorithm is an automated process. When we think about algorithmic governance and deliberative processes, two sets of questions arise. First, where and how do we use the digital in the deliberative process? To select participants? For occasional votes within a meeting? To gather, or even rank, proposals upon which to deliberate? There are many possibilities and pilot projects. Secondly, how should these algorithms be written? The code itself will affect the conditions for decision making, just as any political protocol constrains our options.

Transparency

While voting in face-to-face deliberative processes is uncommon, it might be needed in the online setting. If deliberation leads to a vote, should the public be able to see tabulations of a vote, and should this be in real time? Should the identity of a participant be visible, when commenting or voting? Digital tools are able to record, compile, and present such data quickly.

At the level of the code itself, we must decide whether it should be viewable, and to whom. We can learn from the recent scandal in the Iowa Democratic Primaries, where a closed and privately designed app was used to report voting tabulations and a “coding issue” caused only partial data to be reported. For code to be trustworthy, it needs to be public: transparent and open source, and funded by the people.

Privacy and security

Computer scientists are taught to evaluate the security of a system based on criteria that they call the “C.I.A.” — Confidentiality, Integrity, and Accessibility. That is, communications/data should be seen only by those for whom they are intended. The data must not be compromised or falsified, and communications and information must remain accessible to those who should be able to access it — not blocked, denied, or deleted.

This is perhaps the most urgent issue at hand: as many decision-making bodies move online, making use of pre-existing tools, we must take seriously the threat of conversation surveillance, metadata harvesting, “zoom bombing,” servers crashing (e.g. a cyber attack), and online vote hacking.

Finally, participants working from home may not have the physical privacy to speak or vote as they wish. This is not to say that digital tools should not be used, but that these tools need to be designed to be secure and resilient. In the short term, democratic bodies need to receive careful counsel on which tools to use, and make strategic and perhaps conservative decisions about how to use them.

Digitisation beyond quantification

While many debates regarding digital democracy focus on vote counts, deliberative democracy is much more concerned with conversations and consensus. We need to think carefully about how digital tools might help to facilitate this process, rather than replace it. Some tools, like Loomio or the consul software were developed out of consensus-based communities, with the idea of helping discussions along.

Deliberative assemblies have always also provided the affective conditions for developing empathy, deriving from long-tested traditions of listening. As we move online, we must ask ourselves whether — and if — these experiences can be performed using digital tools. If so, what tools are needed, and how do our practices change? If not, what role should the digital play in supporting the “in-person?”

As we proceed with answering these questions, we should keep in mind three key concepts:

Path Dependency: once an infrastructure or tool is built, we get in the habit of using it, start to organise our activities around it, and to build new technologies on top of it. We should engineer things with this in mind.

Open Source: As one engineer once told me, “open source is honest source.” The code that underpins our decision-making and deliberative procedures should be publicly available.

Participatory Design: The best way to build these tools is through “participatory design,” wherein communities who will be using and affected by the engineering are involved in every stage of the decision-making and testing process.

One of the great accomplishments of deliberative democracy is that it has been evolving and testing non-digital codes and processes for (at least) thousands of years. It offers many protocols from which to draw when imaging digital processes.

Jessica Feldman, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Communications at The American University of Paris , and an affiliated researcher at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab. She researches how digital design does (and does not) work for democracy, and is working on a book on how directly democratic social movements design their own digital tools.

Are you a practitioner delivering a representative deliberative process fully or partially online? The OECD has put together this survey for practitioners about what they are doing, how, and why. Answers are publicly available from the moment they are submitted in this viewable Airtable database (except for the name, job title and email of the individual filling out the form).

This post is part of the Digital for Deliberation series. Read the other articles:

Digital for deliberation: Catching the deliberative wave

We are opening a discussion on the use of digital tools for deliberative processes, in collaboration with our colleagues working on digital government and public sector innovation.

How can digital tools support deliberation? Join the conversation!

The series will focus on three overarching questions: (1) How can digital tools support representative deliberative processes? (2) What are the limits of using digital tools for representative deliberative processes? (3) In what other contexts could these learnings be applied?

Designing an online citizens’ assembly: A practitioner perspective

One of the core elements of a citizens’ assembly is to create the space for people to meet face-to-face. That is where the magic of citizens’ assemblies lies. Why go online then? Marcin Gerwin offers some ideas.

Designing text-based tools for digital deliberation

Ruth Shortall and Anatol Itten consider how understanding and measuring the influence of certain features on the quality of online text-based deliberations can help us make better design decisions.

Online deliberation: Opportunities and challenges

Lyn Carson in conversation with Graham Smith about transferring face-to-face deliberations to an online environment.

The digital participatory process that fed into the French Climate Assembly

The online contributions from the wider public on the Decidim platform enriched the work of the in-person assembly, writes Eloïse Gabadou.

Digital solutions can complement real world participation — but mustn’t exclude

After public meetings can resume, digital participation will likely grow as a complement to offline events. This will broaden citizen engagement — but we have to be careful it doesn’t freeze people out.

Digital parliaments: Adapting democratic institutions to 21st century realities

The coronavirus crisis should be a catalyst for institutionalising the use of digital tools in parliament, argues French MP Paula Forteza.

Public discussions on Covid-19 lockdown in Scotland

Reflections from government on the challenges of digital engagement by Niamh Webster.

Digital tools to open the judiciary: A perspective from Argentina

Pablo Hilaire writes that by promoting conscious uses of digital technologies in favour of open justice, we have learnt that to facilitate and promote deliberation and participation online, we need to put citizens at the centre, from the design to the collection of data and feedback.

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