EnCiv, Inc

We will bring additional automated, deliberative discussion processes online.  These processes will enable more citizens to engage democratically, thoughtfully, and productively with each other and with their representatives. We know from experience that our processes can scale, even to the country as a whole. 

Strategically, the money would be used to fund marketing experts to drive more volunteers to our open source development, on the one hand, and to keep our user participation growing and balanced, on the other. 

At large scale, the discussion processes of social media are like a mob. They are great for advertising and business - for making a profit.  But they are a disaster for democracy.  

There are proven processes for productive, in-person discussion that have been studied and practiced for decades. We are taking these processes online and automating them so they can scale to engage millions of people in productive discussion about our most divisive political challenges.  Imagine millions of people, Republicans, Democrats, Independents and everyone else, from all over the country, discussing and prioritizing problems and solutions, and agreeing en masse on the next steps to achieve them. 

IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE! Decades of practice have shown us that it can happen in person at small scale - and how. We can make it happen online at even the largest scales.

Social media and mass media thrive by dividing people into target markets, then polarizing them with messaging designed to divide them still further.  But, what’s profitable for them is destructive to democracy. 

We offer a web portal with communications processes designed for large scale productive discussion about tough topics that lead to conclusions.  We ask for demographics from our participants so that we can actively work to achieve balanced participation.

Our online communications processes are derived from proven practices of in-person dialog and deliberation to ensure we avoid mobs and instead create synergy - where together people accomplish more than would have been possible before.

There are many tough problems, big and small, crying out for solutions - race relations and policing, healthcare, climate, immigration… But the core problem is not how to solve them, the core problem is that there are so many competing solutions with all sides in a perpetual battle to win rather than solve problems that we are faced with deadlock everywhere we look. 

Our solution is to engage people from all sides of the issues, online and at large scale, in productive dialog and deliberation processes so that they can prioritize the problems, learn from different perspectives, and work toward solutions that make sense to everyone.

In 2020 we worked with Ballotpedia.org to create undebates (candidate conversations) for elections across the country.  Here is an example: https://cc2020.enciv.org/country:us/state:ct/state-legislative-lower:connecticut-house-of-representatives-district-1/stage:general/2020-11-03

And see https://ballotpedia.org/Candid...

We did this working with volunteers found through DemocracyLab.org, HackforLA.org and Taprootplus.org. You can see our code at github.com/EnCiv/undebate

We demonstrated that we can take a very simple communication process, and automate it, and make it scale.

Our next step is “unpoll”, which is how 1000’s of people in thousands of elections can work together productively, and democratically to figure out what few questions to ask the candidates. And this is another process derived from in-persion dialog and deliberation and designed to work at large scale. 

And the unpoll process has applications far beyond just undebates.