interop

RFP: Interoperable Deliberative Tools

Purpose: To support new and existing tools for deliberation and governance, and to promote more interoperability between such tools.

Scope: Digital tools that go beyond basic voting and commenting, and provide new capabilities to the governance ecosystem—which may only be one step of a larger deliberative governance process. 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.

Interoperability requirement: as a key condition of the grant, all grantees must support interoperability by incorporating a process to publish their data in a flatfile format such as JSON, JSON-LD, or CSV as well as a process to import data into their tool from a flatfile. This requirement is described more fully in the draft interoperability specification and rationale accompanying this RFP.

Funded projects

We awarded approximately $200,000 to 14 projects, out of 51 applications received. Additionally, seven project teams whose projects were not selected have been invited to attend the cohort meetings, supported by a small stipend. We will also be conducting an in person workshop in San Francisco for all of the cohort members to convene and collaborate.

People

Key documents

Key dates

About Metagov

Metagov is a laboratory for self-governance on the internet. The mission of Metagov is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. Our research encompasses both theoretical and applied research, including the development of software and technical standards. On top of our research, we also build research networks and bring together communities through our tools, experiments, and events.

A project of Metagov. With thanks to the Mina Foundation.