An Online Environment for Democratic Deliberation: Motivations, Principles, and Design

This paper elucidates the experience and thinking behind our new web-based environment for asynchronous group deliberation: Deme (pronounced "deem"). Deme grew out of participation in and observations of group decision making and community democracy, and is being developed within a university-community partnership to enhance civic participation and to bridge digital divides. Civic decisions in the low-income, multi-lingual community of East Palo Alto, California, have mostly occurred in face-to-face meetings. This leads to a number of problems for community engagement that are amplified in a town where many people work odd shifts, have long commutes, and do not have good sources of local information other than Internet-based ones. Deme addresses these issues with a web environment aimed at making asynchronous text communication compatible with tasks that are ordinarily performed in face-to-face meetings. It has been designed for, and in collaboration with, small to medium-sized civil society groups that currently use email or message-board systems. We describe four criteria for groupware aimed at groups that ordinarily meet face-to-face: supporting the group's overall needs, comprehensive task support, enhancing group participation, and facilitating high-quality decisions. Deme's features are described with reference to these criteria.