So far, we have used Delib-3 as a testing ground for developing a deliberative web application. Delib 3 had many features, including a summary of group decisions and the ability to express opinions during public discussions and per-option chats. One of the main drawbacks of Delib 3 was its complexity. It was simple to use by the participants, but for admins, starting a group and a discussion was confusing. Overall, it didn’t produce retention.
Therefore we design a new Delib (4) from scratch to solve the complexity issue. This time we put more emphasis on admin and participants’ UX. We are looking for simplicity before we get into the more sophisticated features needed for online deliberation. We want to achieve retention before we achieve deliberation. We hope that after we achieve retention, we can develop a better deliberation app according to the Agile methodology.
To make the app as simple as possible and to induce deliberation, we created “Councils” and voting. The user can initiate a council and send it to a group by a link. The new members of the council can vote and add new options. The app also notifies the members, by push notification, whenever some new option for a solution is added. in this app, minimal deliberation may begin when people will discuss the different solutions on other platforms and see the results of their deliberation on the online voting board. Later, we aim to develop a smart chat board to help improve deliberation.
For us, this will be the MVP (minimal viable product).
We are now looking for design partners to help us develop Delib 4. We are looking for people with groups that want to achieve democratic decisions via online deliberation.
Delib 4 repo: https://github.com/delib-org/Delib4.4