Work the problem before you vote on it.
A shared cause-and-effect map, teams taking one strand each, and a record of what was decided and why.
Most group decisions arrive as a motion: a proposition, a discussion, a show of hands. What is missing is the part before that — agreeing what actually causes what, splitting the work so people can go deep rather than broad, and surfacing the places where two teams' conclusions cannot both hold. This is that part.
The question this demonstration works through
Should the way we tax land change, and what would actually happen to housing if it did?
It was chosen because it is genuinely contested, because reasonable people reach opposite conclusions from the same evidence, and because it is a system rather than a slogan — the sort of question that goes badly when it is put straight to a vote.
Background material the teams were given
Every deliberation starts from a briefing. This one draws on arguments that circulate in public debate. It is presented as the teams received it — as a position to be tested, not a conclusion to be accepted.
Tax what we have too much of, and less of what we want more of. We tax wages heavily and the increase in land values barely at all — so effort is taxed and holding land is not.
- The claim. A charge on the unimproved value of land, offset by cutting the tax taken from wages, would make holding land idle expensive and working less penalised. Revenue-neutral overall.
- Why land specifically. Land cannot be moved offshore or hidden, and its value comes largely from what the community built around it — roads, schools, pipes — rather than anything the owner did.
- The mechanism it targets. Land held back from development while its value rises; bank credit flowing to land rather than to businesses; housing treated as the household's main retirement savings.
- The strongest objection. People who are asset-rich and cash-poor — notably retired owners — would face a bill they cannot pay from income, and a deliberate flattening of house-price growth falls hardest on those who planned around it.
- The contested empirical question. Whether a holding charge is passed through to renters or absorbed by the owner. Both are argued from evidence.
The briefing deliberately includes the strongest objection alongside the proposal. A deliberation whose background material only argues one way produces a vote, not a decision.
One map, authored by people
Before anyone argues, the group agrees what affects what. Arrows carry a sign: + means the two move together, − means one rises as the other falls. Loops that reinforce themselves are marked R; loops that push back toward balance are B. Nothing here is generated: the facilitator imports the map the group agreed, which is what makes it arguable.
Three of the circled loops reinforce. Speculation: rising land values attract buyers expecting further rises, which raises values again. Credit: banks lend against land, which bids up the land they lend against. Savings: higher prices make housing a better store of wealth, which raises demand for it. Two push back. Supply: homes completed eventually restrain price. Holding charge: a tax on land value makes idle land expensive to keep, which releases sections — that one is the proposed intervention, and whether it is strong enough to damp the other three is exactly what the teams disagree about.
Five strands, five teams, one each
A whole-group discussion of a system this size produces a discussion of whichever part was mentioned last. Instead each team claims one strand and goes deep. They see the whole map; they answer for one part of it.
Inside one strand
Each team gets its own thread. This is an excerpt from the renters and first-home access team — invented participants, working a real disagreement.
A decision point is not a show of hands
When a team is ready, it puts a specific question — not a mood — to a structured vote. This one uses a consent scale: the question is not "who likes this" but "can anyone not live with it, and why". An objection has to say what it is.
The AI can draft a question and an option set. It cannot confirm one — a person edits and confirms, and that confirmation is what opens the vote. A machine suggestion that nobody edited is not a decision anyone made.
Checkpoints, so nobody works in a hole
Every so often each team publishes a digest of where it has got to. The digest is machine-drafted and then edited and approved by a person before any other team sees it. What is approved is what is recorded.
Where two teams cannot both be right
Because the strands are parts of one map, some of them touch. When two coupled teams reach conclusions that pull against each other, that tension is raised automatically from the map's own structure — not from anyone's opinion — and it blocks a strand from closing until it is resolved or the disagreement is recorded on the record.
A recorded disagreement is a legitimate outcome. Teams are not forced into a synthetic consensus; they are required to state, in the record, that they looked at the same coupling and still disagree.
The membership decides, not the working group
Teams do the work; they do not own the outcome. Each concluded strand goes to the whole membership with a briefing, against an electorate fixed at the moment the round opened — so the roll cannot move while the vote is running.
What the record actually says
A sealed deliberation record is not a summary someone wrote afterwards. It names the question, the map version it was argued against, who was eligible to vote, what each team concluded, which tensions were resolved and which were recorded as disagreements, and the outcome — signed, so a later copy can be checked against it.
Sealing fails safe. Records are signed by the governance service, not by the Village itself. If the signing service cannot be reached, no record is produced, rather than an unsigned one presented as sealed. The structure above is what a sealed record contains.
Where to next
Deliberation Village is the heaviest of the deciding tools. If it is more than your group needs, the lighter ones are worth seeing first — they are not lesser versions of this, they answer different questions.
What is real and what is not
- Real. The map model, the strand and team structure, decision points and their vote types, checkpoints and digest approval, cross-checks derived from the map, the ratification round with a pinned electorate, and the record structure. All of it is built and runs.
- Invented. Every person, message, digest, vote and number on this page. The deliberation shown never happened.
- Real, and gated twice. Reaching Deliberation Village needs a platform switch and, separately, a switch on the individual Village. This page does not tell you whether any particular Village has turned it on, and it is not itself a live Village — what you are reading is a worked example, not a session you can join.
- English only. This demonstration page and the app's own screens are in English for now. The provisional-translation notice that appears on translated pages is deliberately absent here rather than telling you that you are reading a translation that does not exist.
- Not claimed. That any of this produces better decisions. That is the argument the software is built on, and it is not evidence.