Deliberation at National Scale

Democracy has always struggled with the reality that meaningful deliberation does not scale. Town halls, citizens' assemblies, and public comment periods work best in small groups, and small groups cannot represent a nation. This project aims to change that, building on an existing open-source video deliberation platform to enable millions of people to participate in structured, meaningful civic conversations simultaneously. AI handles the hard problems of scale, ensuring diverse viewpoints are represented, surfacing insights from small groups to the broader conversation, and making the entire process transparent and auditable. The five-year vision is a national deliberation involving at least half a percent of the U.S. population; starting with city-level pilots in Boston and New York.