Why this matters

Democratic deliberation depends on the infrastructure it runs on. Today, most civic-tech and deliberation tools are siloed, cloud-hosted, and owned by a single actor — meaning the conversations they host can be captured, exported in proprietary formats, or simply shut off. This session presents ongoing work to build a deliberately interoperable, anti-capture stack for community decision-making, grounded in the principles of the Decentralized Democracy Stack (DDS, a W3C community effort).

What we'll cover in the talk

What is Delib Tech!
We’ll kick off with a short interactive poll/conversation using the tools we’re presenting to demonstrate what delib tech might do then define it for everyone to know!.
What’s not working?
It’s really hard to run a collective decision making process. You have to figure out who should be in the room, let them all know, do a massive amount of pre-mapping and scoping to figure the right problem, run a process (there are MANY options) and then deal with the synthesis of a massive amount of information. This complexity and the massive value of getting access to deep elaboration from communities on what they want and need opens the door for corporate giants to step in with a 1-size fits all solution that is ungovernable or customizable to local needs.

What we’re doing
We build off of Metagov’s Modular Politics Research and implement the Metagov Deliberative Tooling Ontology in collaboration with Crownshy and the Decentralized Deliberation standard to explore how we might create a capture resistant ecosystem of apps that help us rule ourselves and can in turn be ruled.

The current prototype includes Polis, Talk to the City, Heyform, and Red Dwarf working over AT Protocol (the same foundation as Bluesky) so that:
- Statements, votes, and sensemaking artifacts flow between tools in near real time, not just as a final export.
- The data stream is public and verifiable; additional actors in the ecosystem can enrich it.
- Community members can locally verify that the algorithm they chose is the one being run — a key freedom in a world of opaque recommendation systems.
- Communities can exit with everything: conversation history, identities, analysis — portable by design.

We’ll open conversation about what’s not working
Auth in deliberation is hard. Sometimes deliberations aren’t valid unless you know exactly who is speaking, sometimes deliberations are extremely risky to the participants and the people can’t be named. In either case - establishing that any participant is a single, real person, who can actually speak to the subject at hand is critical.

Who is invited

• Citizens and community members who would like to have more autonomy over their lives.

• Civ tech folks who want to join the coalition of folks beginning to use this standard.

• Technicians in decentralized identity, zk proofs, decentralized protocols, and other such things to help build the standard + guidelines for engineering.

• There is no technical background required.

Intended outcomes
People leave knowing
1. Why interoperability between deliberation tools is a political question, not just a technical one.
3. The current state of the work on the Metagov Ontology + the Decentralized Deliberation Standard and where contributors are needed.
4. How to build on or contribute to this infrastructure especially along identity + data Sovereignty dimensions.
5. We get some fun battle testing of the new system!

Speakers
Stuart Lynn - CTO of CrownShy,
Lee DeSota - Head Facilitator at Metagov.

Some Links!
Metagov
- https://metagov.org/
- https://github.com/metagov/ontology

Crownshy
- https://crown-shy.com/
- https://github.com/crownshy/comhairle

Decentralized Deliberation standard
- Website: https://www.dds.xyz
- Github of the working group: https://github.com/dds-wg/dds
- W3C Community Group: https://www.w3.org/community/dds/join
- Matrix group chat: https://matrix.to/#/#dds-wg:matrix.org