What is Deliberation Gateway?

Deliberation Gateway is a publishing imprint that specialises in creative work to help a wide range of people understand deliberative democracy. Our published output is generated from experience because we actively nucleate professional working groups that instantiate sector assemblies. We also perform active scientific and theoretical research into deliberative democracy using modeling based approaches. We were founded in 2018 as an RSA fellows' network that has evolved.

What we publish? Essays, reviews, research papers, recorded conversations, software, numerical models and documentation of our in-person or online proceedings, such as the Citizens’ Industrial Strategy. Each work item is given a document number in our register, so the work can be cited and built on.

Who it is for? Every industry has back rooms where steering groups, drawn from academia and industry, decide the fate of whole parts of our economy—whether it’s AI, synthetic biology, the W3 Consortium, spectrum management and so on. Their calls are often technical, but many carry ethical or societal weight that no such committee — often they are self-appointed — has the natural authority to settle. However well-meaning they are, experts tend to favour technical fixes. Everyday citizens deserve a seat in such rooms, but — from a purely practical point of view — the average citizen doesn’t possess the technical knowledge necessary to take part.

A citizens’ assembly is a great way to address such scenarios because they balance technical, commercial and human considerations in a constructive way that benefits all participants. Deliberation Gateway helps professional bodies engage with the professional deliberative democracy community, one sector at a time. Any professional committee that sees value in generating a formal civic judgement can begin exploring how to set up a public facing participatory process through our network. Each new sector we engage brings more and more networks of professionals into deliberation, and that creates the opportunity for the public to have a voice in industrial strategy, somewhere between the prime minister and the CEO; a voice that citizens have never been able to use before.

What is a Sector Assembly? A citizens’ assembly called by an industry or professional sector — perhaps through a professional body such as the IOP, RSC, UKRI, BMA or TLS — in which citizens chosen by lot help the whole sector shape long-term strategy that transcends political cycles. Its output is a civic judgement: a deeply considered verdict, in the spirit of a jury’s, on which the sector can build shared guidelines for questions such as AI, healthcare, regulation or research ethics. It is a useful document to have to hand when an industry is stuck on a complex question. Any sector with an obligation to engage the public can draw on our experience to run one. Above all, a sector assembly brings the public and the profession into ethical alignment — professionals, after all, are people too.

How to take part? We publish vision statements that we call “Gateways” in which we envisage how a sector assembly or some other participatory process could affect society, we invite people to read these, and allow groups to write their own. Feel free to submit your own contribution for consideration as publication under our label. Come to one of our events, or simply get in touch.

More Info Who are we? The work we do.

The long version of our origin story is our first publication: The Democracy Tree.