DESCRIPTION
Governing Ourselves With or Without AI
As AI becomes more involved in public deliberation processes, this project works to define and teach what good facilitation looks like, helping train people and AI systems capable of training even more people in collective decision-making for self-governance.
With partners:
- https://harmonica.chat/ Artem Zhiganov
- https://commoningstandard.org/ Cecile Green, Seth Frey
- https://crown-shy.com/ Stuart Lynn
- https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/oxford-computational-political-science-group Maria Milosh
- https://www.cip.org/ Zarinah Agnew, Maddy Abrahams, Ken Ojibe
Lead Facilitator: Lee DeSota
PATHS TO PARTICIPATION
This project emerged from Metagov’s 2025 AI & Facilitation Seminar series.
In 2026, we received a grant from the Mozilla Foundation to create a synthesis of expert knowledge, practices, and skills of two of the many steps in a full deliberation stack:
‘elicitation’ (provisional definition: understanding one’s own position)
‘encountering’ (provisional definition: relating one’s position to other people’s positions)
Expert deliberative facilitators may apply to participate in this definitional process, which will take place virtually this Fall (September-November 2026) with some work through June 2027, and, if accepted, receive a small stipend ($200) and recognition of authorship. There is a second opportunity for experts to contribute by setting evaluation criteria for AI agents trained on the resulting facilitation knowledge, skills, and practices. The goal is to augment facilitation training for people so that many, many more people respond to the governance crisis by learning the skills of collective self-governance with or without AI.
Join the conversation in the Metagov Slack channel #ai-facilitation.
DISCUSSION FORUM
Meetings are partners only.