Deliberation Talk notes

[JamesPHoughton]

Please give feedback!

[markwhiting]

1. I think the infrastructure and driving decisions for it are so important here but also quite complicated and novel — perhaps people would benefit from a high-level picture upfront. I feel like you say "theres a lot of vagueness" and you close the loop by saying things like "everything is specified in a manifest" but I think that loop is pretty big. I wonder if you could close that loop fast, and then dig into it over a few slides with details and revisit the entire loop again at the end.
2. Just a thought about selection bias, how similar is this bias to the bias of people who actually participate in deliberative activities in society?
3. The "goals for the first study" feels very technically focused. I wonder if there are 1) biggest problems in this space or 2) areas you are particularly excited by for some narrative reason, or 3) a mechanical goal in the first study, e.g., to demonstrate the mechanism. Personally, I feel like 1 or 2 are stronger motivations for a job market context, i.e., giving a window into your substantive focal areas in addition to your engineering approach.

[shapeseas]

• I appreciate the early examples: simple to understand and get to the essence of how different groups and topics could be explored through this project. I wonder if there's an example directly around political deliberation that you could bring in.
• I lost you a bit on the manifest files and how those roll up from collaborators. Could there be more visual explanation of how those get built or contributed? Reflecting on this more - I think the best way to convey this to a non-technical audience would be to describe a simple scenario where they may contribute their own experiment. Something like "You'd like to run a study on this platform where you look at X. In order to do that, you do not need to write custom code, you'd simply define a manifest file with the order participants go through."
• I appreciate the breadth of examples within collaboration - listening, leader assignment. It gives life to the approach of the scientific process and how the tech could be utilized.
• For groups that have reference points on some of these questions - i.e. have read literature or run experiments in that domain - what's their reaction? Citizen science branding:
• Instead of donate your organs to science it's donate your conversations to science :D
• Person 1: "I'm an organ donor."
• Person 2: "I'm a deliberation donor."