The Platform
Our conversations are hosted on the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform — a video chat platform designed for group discussions and available on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
In small, diverse groups, participants meet and talk with their fellow Americans, learn the facts of an issue and the best arguments from all sides, and share their experiences, concerns, and values. In so doing, they develop more informed opinions.
Data for Democracy
Then we release these anonymized results to the public.
If you have any concerns about how your data is used, please don't hesitate to contact us. For more information, see our privacy policy.
We ask participants to complete short surveys before and after they deliberate.
After enough have participated, we aggregate the results for each topic, looking for statistical trends in how opinions change when Americans deliberate:
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Whether they enjoyed the deliberation
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Whether they become more informed
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Whether their views on the policy proposals changed
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Whether their views of each other improved
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And whether they found common ground.
What We Do
Who We Are
Equal Citizens and The People are catalyzing DELIBERATIONS.US with the goal of creating a new nonprofit dedicated to fostering deliberative conversation. This is our team.
Lawrence Lessig
Founder
Katie Fahey
Executive Director, The People
Jasmine Hull
Chief Operating Officer
Willoughby J. Winograd
Consultant
Our Deliberations
We craft engaging, fact-based, and politically balanced deliberations on American political issues. These conversations are hosted on a custom video chat platform specially designed for group conversations. Sign up to hear when more deliberations become available.