Project Spotlight: $200,000 Grant Program for Interoperable Deliberative Tools
A request for proposals for interoperable open-source tools for deliberation and digital governance.
Welcome to another Metagov Project Spotlight.
In this spotlight, we delve into the ongoing Interoperable Deliberative Tools RFP (Request For Proposals), an initiative supported by a grant from the Mina Foundation. This is a $200,000 grant program, with grants ranging from $5,000 to $100,000, with the aim of enhancing and integrating deliberative tools within digital governance ecosystems, creating more composable workflows for deliberative governance.
What exactly do we mean by deliberative tools?
We have in mind digital tools that facilitate the discussion and careful debate of various options confronting an organization. These are tools that go beyond basic voting and commenting, and when taken together are able to provide new and composable governance capabilities. 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.
Deliberative tools may support any part of the governance and decision-making process, going from opinions to decisions, including but not limited to:
identifying tradeoffs
drafting policies
editing policies
identifying scenarios and cases
mapping a problem space, solution space, or stakeholder space
identifying/routing expertise
navigating conflict, identifying and overcoming ‘cruxes’
coming to decisions
evaluating evidentiary justification for decisions
reconciling conflicting versions of policies
executing on policies
adjudicating using policies or cases
determining budgets
creating agendas or priorities
etc.
Some examples of deliberative tools include:
What do we mean by interoperability?
A key condition of the grant is that all grantees must support interoperability — the ability for data to be shared and exchanged between and across tools. Projects are expected to meet this requirement by incorporating a process to publish their data in a flat-file format such as JSON, JSON-LD, or CSV.
Our vision is that increased interoperability between these tools will lead to more opportunities for the use of deliberative decision-making tools, and ultimately advance more collective governance. Interoperability requirements are described more fully in the draft specification and rationale accompanying this RFP.
The grant program is tech-agnostic — we do not expect applicants to utilize any specific technologies or tools.
Key details
Deadline for the RFP: May 31st
Our RFP was announced April 1st and has since facilitated two FAQ sessions. To continue supporting prospective applicants we are conducting one final FAQ session this week, on May 15th, and encourage all potential grant applicants to register for the session. We are also maintaining a document of FAQs.
As part of the initiative, we are also looking for a Senior Research Engineer to lead the development of digital infrastructure and standards designed to support the interoperability of deliberative and governance tools. This position represents a unique opportunity to shape the future of deliberation and governance tools.
We encourage readers to actively engage with this initiative by joining the #interoperability channel in our Slack and engaging in the conversation there. Whether you are a long-time community member or not yet part of Metagov, please feel free to apply to the RFP and/or join the community Slack if this is of interest to you. The #interoperability channel is also a place where applicants can ask questions about the RFP, meet other prospective applicants, and begin to form collaborations.
If you know of individuals, projects, or communities working in and around deliberative tooling, please share our RFP website within your networks to ensure a diverse range of applicants and innovative ideas are submitted and enabled to interoperate with each other.
We are looking forward to seeing the applications and the types of decisions that will be empowered by this cohort of developers, researchers, and practitioners working together to make their work interoperable with each other.
- Nitin Mariserla
The Interoperable Deliberative Tools RFP would not be possible without the work and contributions of:
Aviv Ovadya - AI & Democracy Foundation
Joshua Tan - Co-Founder/RD, Metagov
Amy Zhang - University of Washington
Colin Megill - Pol.is
Eugene Leventhal - ED, Metagov
Nitin Mariserla - PM, Metagov