Interoperable Deliberative Tools At Metagov, Summer 2025 update
Walk with us towards deliberative tools that we can govern
Photo Credit - Adversarial Interoperability
The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Cohort (IDT, or “Interop”) is one of Metagov’s largest and most active research areas. Check out our first post (May 2024), mid-term report (September 2024), and recent update (May 2025). This post contains updates from early summer 2025.
For those who are new here, here are the Interop plot points:
May 2024: the Mina Foundation (THANK YOU) supplied funds for founding Research Director Aviv to kick off the Interoperable Deliberative Tools grant program with the Metagov team, and distribute $200,000k for Open Source Deliberative Tools to prioritize interoperability.
July 2024: we gathered 21 teams to approach interoperability questions together.
October 2024: we hosted an on-site where each team demonstrated its individual work towards meeting minimum viable interoperability standards defined as an exportable flat file with a defined data structure. Thereafter, we shifted our priority from individual work to collaborative work.
January 2025: our five-day online symposium celebrated the progress made during Interop1, and launched six working groups to grapple with the gnarly details of making functional interoperability among open source, deliberative tools a reality.
June 2025: the six working groups came together for a mid-year Research Area Roundup to brief each other on their progress and check alignment. This post captures their ways of working, achievements, and explains how new contributors might get involved.
Before we dive in, I want to bring you into WHY we do this work.
The mission of this research area is to make today’s collective intelligence tools more open, modular, and interoperable, laying the groundwork for a capture-resistant ecosystem of deliberative tooling in which process innovation thrives and local creativity blossoms.
Our vision is the empowerment of ever more people to self-rule, and the development of capacities to self-rule.
To keep ourselves accountable to those ends, we prioritize tools that upskill humans over machines, because participating in our own governance is inherently valuable. We prioritize open source because the tools we’re using to govern ourselves must be governable themselves. We prioritize building sustainable business models because otherwise, the people building tools and the communities using them would exhaust their energy and capacity to be self-governing. We prioritize modularity and interoperability because governing ourselves is a collective process as varied as the combinations of humans on this earth, and simplifying that process into a monolithic governance system is insufficient to realize self-rule.
Here’s how we’re moving towards a deliberative tools ecosystem resistant to corporate capture and supportive of creativity.
The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Research Area
This research area is bubbling with working groups, each focused on pushing forward critical components of the purpose we’ve described above. And it is in itself as modular as we hope the tools themselves to be. The figure above shows how we’ve organized the research area into two themes, which we colloquially refer to as “Hard-line values” and “Feel-good Standards” (thank you, Audrey Tang, for the framing :).
From there, each of these themes splits into three working groups, which further subdivide as the work becomes more defined. Each working group has membership boundaries and a lead. Lee DeSota is Lead Facilitator and Project Manager for the entire research area. The research area is directed by Liz Barry, with occasional essential support from Metagov RDs Aviv Ovadya, Amy Zhang, Eugene Leventhal, and Josh Tan.
⭐️ If you have an interest in this topic generally, the place to get started is the lobby channel in Metagov Slack: #deliberative-tools-and-interop
Table Of Contents
The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Research Area
Standards
This theme standardizes a sociotechnical vocabulary and ontology for deliberative tooling
Data Mesh Working Group
Purpose:
We are building an ontology that deliberative tools from across the governance cycle can translate their data into to allow for easy communication between many tools.
We see an open source ecosystem that is resistant to capture by corporate entities, where the tools we use to govern ourselves are themselves able to be governed.
Scope leads: Stuart Lynn, Maggie Hughes
Current Work:
Building a deliberative tooling ontology: This group is exploring a data mesh model where each tool maintains control over its data + ontological structure while also aligning with collective standards to promote interoperability between many tools without needing to create pairwise integrations for every tool.
Working on translation scripts to convert tool-specific data into a shared format.
Synthesizing several independent ontologies into a high-level standard.
Public Presentation + Feedback: Authored a Work-In-Progress publication on the model above for data exchange between deliberative platforms and was accepted to Aarhus 2025. Presented a poster at the conference.
In-person events: in-person events that convene to iterate on the ontology and rotate regionally around the world as opportunities arise in partnership with other events / conferences that bring people together.
Just hosted one August 22-23 in Aarhus, Denmark, blog post forthcoming!
Call for Participants:
Looking for participants who are either
Managing or building a governance process that requires interoperability between several open source tools.
Working with an open source tool, they want to make it interoperable with other tools in the context of a governance process.
The next big call for participation is on the 30th - 31st of October at the Foundations for the Digital Commons event in Maine, USA. Register here!
To see the work + stay updated when we’re inviting new participants, join #data-puddle on the Metagov Slack.
Open Facilitation Library
Purpose:
Build a shared library and synthesize standards that can train human and machine agents to self-govern/rule/organizeto better facilitate discussion towards our collective shared goals.
We want collective intelligence, self-rule, and human cooperation at scale to be both possible and commonplace.
Scope leads: Artem Zhiganov, Cecile Green
Current Work:
Open Facilitation Library Synthesis: This scope is led by Cecile Green and the Commoning Standard team and is working to synthesize knowledge and practices from self-governance researchers and practitioners, including the deliberative facilitation frameworks, into the current version of the Commoning Standard.
Primitives of Agentic Facilitation: This scope is led by Artem Zhiganov and focuses on designing AI-readable facilitation “primitives” that build off of the synthesized facilitation standards above. This includes:
Structured facilitation patterns using web standards.
Building training datasets of facilitation processes.
Developing evaluation (eval) prompts.
Open Facilitation Stewards: This scope is focused on articulating clear operating agreements, including making a sustainable business model such that the facilitation knowledge, technical contributors, and the standard creators are adequately and recurrently prioritized and compensated for this knowledge.
Open Facilitation Demos: This presentation-oriented meeting invites experienced facilitators + researchers to share knowledge and work towards a synthesized facilitation standard to act as the base of the Machine Actionable Framework.
Call for Participants:
Open Facilitation Library is actively synthesizing knowlege and facilitation practices into and standards. Researchers, Facilitators, AI/Knowledge Engineers with relevant practices or methodologies, are encouraged to contribute.
To see the work and introduce yourself, join #ai-facilitation on the Metagov Slack.
Reference Architecture Working Group
Purpose:
To collaboratively diagram the world’s largest and most complex workflows in civic engagement and democratic innovation. We are establishing generic graphic conventions useful for representing multi-stage, hybrid in-person/online deliberative processes.
We wish to compare implementations of deliberative processes to speed learning for those who design these processes.
Scope leads: Liz Barry and Audrey Tang
Current Work:
Articulating a governance loop: metagov.org/files/govloop.pdf
Building a gallery of open source deliberative tools organized by the phases of deliberation: metagov.org/delib-tools
Creating a reference architecture for combining in-person and online processes
Developing a collaborative workbook of visual process diagrams by co-authoring with process designers from initiatives such as Taiwan’s AI Alignment Assembly, Germany’s “Forum Against Fakes,” Brasil’s Participiva, and Tokyo’s AI participatory mayoral campaign.
Each process is mapped using a template that includes phase of deliberation, mode of outreach and sampling, number of participants, mode of connection (in-person, online synchronous/asynchronous), degree of interaction, type of input, type of transformation (technology not namebrand), and outputs.
Call for Participants:
The group invites:
Designers of large-scale public engagement or collective intelligence processes
Tool developers who support those processes.
Architects and urban designers who have expertise in diagramming abstract machines; please note that this is different from data viz or storyboarding.
Participants are welcome to contribute their projects to the collaborative workbook and help improve shared understanding of participatory workflows across tools and cultures. All process designers who contribute their implemented process design become co-authors of this collaborative workbook.
DRI and Polis Working Group
Purpose:
To adapt and test the Deliberative Reason Index (DRI) within the Polis platform to measure the quality of deliberation—not by consensus, but by consistency between participants’ values and their policy preferences.
We're aiming to bring political science into the development of e-democracy tools, in order to improve both the tools and academic understanding of them.
Scope leads: Joseph Gubbels and Jonathan Warden
Current Work:
Implemented early experiments using public Polis datasets.
Identified challenges due to Polis not distinguishing between values and policy preferences.
Initiated collaboration with the academic authors of the DRI metric to address validity issues and modify the metric for better use in Polis.
Call for Participants:
The group is especially interested in collaborators who can help with adapting DRI in Polis and refining the methodology, and connecting with academic political scientists.
To see the work, join #dri-in-polis channel on Slack.
Values
This theme advances core democratic values and articulates the rights of participants.
Participation Ethics Working Group
Purpose:
We estimate >1M people have already experienced tooling environments created by <1k developers, and anticipate that another million+ will have such encounters in the next 12 months. And as a result, we build legal infrastructure that centers participant ownership over their data instead of participant consent to data right loss.
We want participant rights and ethical data practices to be centered across the ecosystem in large-scale deliberation and digital governance—beyond compliance + consent—to ensure people know, understand, and can exercise their rights in participatory contexts.
Scope leads: Matthew Victor (2025 H1)
Current Work:
Created a Terms of Service template for organizations that need participant-facing data policies.
Shifted from “radical consent” (opt-in for everything) to prioritizing clear, actionable rights and ownership that reduce participant fatigue.
Developing frameworks for handling redacted participant contributions and their downstream impact on decisions.
Call for Participants:
Looking for ethics-minded designers, legal thinkers, and framework builders to help make participant rights real, practical, and empowering.
Join the #participation-ethics Slack channel on the Metagov Slack.
Theory and Practice Working Group
Purpose:
To bridge the gap between democratic theory and the design and implementation of emerging participatory tools—so that academic theory informs practice and practitioner insight informs theory.
We work so that the scaling of participation through digital means advances the promise of massively deliberative democracy without fueling technocracy.
Scope leads: Joseph Gubbels
Current Work:
Published an essay on values in governance tooling in a series alongside authors Audrey Tang + Lawrence Lessig.
Hosted seminars on participation and deliberation.
Participation: reading list.
Deliberation: reading list.
Developing a research guide for self-directed learners curious about political theory.
Conducting interviews with practitioners to understand how theory could better serve real-world democratic tooling.
Supporting cross-project collaborations like the DRI & Polis work (see next Working Group).
Call for Participants:
Open to both practitioners and theorists. If you're interested in making sense of democratic theory in the context of practical tool-building—or want your work to be more grounded in political philosophy—join the Slack channel and participate in upcoming seminars or research.
See the discussion at #theory-practice channel in the Metagov Slack.
Conversa: exploring Polislike tools and practices
Purpose:
To build a peer-to-peer learning and support network for practitioners who use Polis and similar bridging tools—focused on facilitation, re-imagined interfaces, and algorithmic innovation.
Our vision is to foster a space for experimenting with Polis-like tools, so that these tools can support the massively intersectional culture that results from stabilizing as much difference across as many boundaries as possible.
We aspire to help Polis process stakeholders of all backgrounds in learning to understand, to explain, and to defend the methods and trade-offs of Polis-like tools. New exploratory interfaces will support new forms of curiosity-driven “perspective cartography”, helping users to build intuitions around navigating complex topics. Thoughtful and accessible metaphors will allow all of us – curious participants and facilitators alike – to make sense of not only the subtle hidden dimensions of our fellow citizens, but of the very algorithmic processes that reveal us to one another. This emerging and wider field of practitioners – platform maintainers, conversation facilitators, interface designers and data scientists – will openly iterate together on the technical underpinnings of this new class of democratic tool.
Scope Leads: patcon
Current Work:
Hosting weekly, lightly structured drop-in calls for practitioners. We welcome all silly questions, roaring successes, last-minute demos & hare-brained ideas.
Compiling a comprehensive list of 360+ known Polis conversations and a directory of 700+ people with Polis-related experience.
Cultivating a Discord community (~170 people) for ongoing exchange.
Building and sharing libraries and prototypes: red-dwarf algorithm library, opinion landscape painter, data pipeline explorer, Awesome Polis directory
Crafting thoughtful and accessible metaphors to ground user and facilitator intuitions.
Call for Participants:
This group is welcoming to folks interested in running Polis conversations, experimenting with new interfaces, and exploring improvements in its algorithmic pipeline.
Join the Polis User Group Discord, drop into a call, read our past call notes, or visit the #polislike Slack channel in Metagov.
Conclusion
There is a huge amount of work to be done towards building a more modular, governable, and capture-resistant ecosystem, and we’re just barely getting started. Many of these groups are looking for participants either right now or sometime in the future. If they are interesting to you, please join the Slack channels, lurk, learn, and let us know how you’d like to contribute.
We’ll be back sometime in January 2026 with a new update :)
Should also check out the adjacent SAAFE delib-tech initiative! https://delibtech.com/homepage