Working with international SDDP practitioners we are actively promoting reserach into an online SDDP, that could support a larger community of participants.  

Our goal is to provide an alternative large group participation paradigm moving away from simple majority voting, unstructured group discussions, and less than satisfactory trade-offs. We do not consider that this could be in any manner a panacea for all forms of large-scale deliberative dialogue, such as citizen assembliesand mini-publics.  It would, however, enable larger numbers of stakeholders to meaningfully participate in true dialogue in environments characterized by genuine mutual learning, focused and convergent discussions, and consensus-building. As such it would be the antitheses of the “Twitter politics” that is prevalent today.  Although the scientific systemic design laws underpinning SDDP have been repeatedly validated, empirically and scientifically, in the arena of face-to-face practice, they have yet to be validated in an online environment with larger numbers of participants. 

We will exploit the benefits of f2f structured interactions (e.g., building shared understanding, collective systemic thinking, showing and expressing empathy, absence of cognitive overload, engagement in implementing results) in cyberspace. At the heart of the vision is the ability to treat ideas, observations or arguments expressed by participants as “objects” upon which mathematical and computational operations can be performed.  Theoretical constructs and technologies are envisioned to remain faithful to the rules of face-to-face SDDP.  The future online SDDP platform will seek to inspire and inform the invention of science-enabled systems, tools, and technologies capable of collecting, processing, and synthesizing people’s contributions into a meaningful whole.