We understand democracy as a set of social technologies, infrastructures, and methods for power-sharing. To be impactful, it needs essential building blocks:

• legal, organizational, and potentially technical structures that bind decisions to legitimate processes
• transparency mechanisms that enable accountability
• the capacity to adapt when those structures risk being captured or made irrelevant

We understand democracy as both normative (some decisions should not be made unilaterally due to their consequential risks on society) and structural (we need systems capable of actually enforcing this normative principle).

Specifically, our approach focuses on representative deliberative democracy as a particularly powerful democratic system capable of working across organizations of various sizes, incorporating diverse perspectives, and generating common ground on polarizing questions.

That said, deliberation is one instrument within a larger democratic infrastructure and not the whole of it. Our aim is to support those who run good enough* processes and ensure that the outcomes of those processes influence what happens in the world, that cooperation between powerful actors becomes more likely, and that no single entity, human or AI, is able to concentrate power in ways that disempower everyone else. In sum, then, by “democracy” we mean a governance architecture through which we try to keep that from happening.

*”Good enough” means that the outputs of these methods must satisfy key criteria across dimensions like quality, robustness, representativeness, or legitimacy. Success should be measured with respect to the current needs and the existing methods (and the ability to evolve to be better), not an unattainable ideal of perfect democracy and justice.

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