Spec:
mosaiclab-deliberationin the method-specs registry · Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0 · Status: draft · Reference runtime: Harmonica
MosaicLab Deliberation is a facilitated deliberation that takes a small, mixed group from a clear question to a set of recommendations the group has refined together and can stand behind. It is the conversational core of the citizens’-assembly process set out in MosaicLab’s Facilitating Deliberation: the group makes sense of balanced information, sets its own criteria, generates and clusters options, writes recommendations on behalf of everyone, and refines them until each reaches an 80% comfort threshold.
Who it’s for. A facilitator running a structured deliberation with a small mixed group — a citizens’ panel, a stakeholder group, a staff or community body — on a real question where the group’s considered judgement should carry weight.
The arc (Kaner’s Diamond)
The group diverges, generating many options and surfacing differences, passes through a “groan zone” of difficulty, and then converges on shared recommendations. The facilitator holds that shape: open the divergence wide, stay steady through the groan zone, and only then help the group converge and decide. Each stage’s output carries into the next, so judgement is built up rather than rushed.
The chain (six stages)
- Understand the remit and agree how to work — make the remit and scope clear; let the group set its own working agreements.
- Make sense of the information — process the balanced background together, ORID-style (facts, then reactions, then meaning), surfacing what is still unclear.
- Set the group’s own criteria — name what a good recommendation must satisfy, in the group’s words, before generating options.
- Generate and cluster options — open a wide divergence, then have the group cluster ideas into named themes and check what is missing.
- Draft recommendations — turn clusters into clear recommendations with reasoning, written on behalf of everyone.
- Refine to an 80% comfort threshold — test each recommendation on a Love-it/Loathe-it scale and rewrite across rounds until it reaches supermajority comfort; note minority statements rather than forcing agreement.
The artifact is a multi-session chain: each stage’s summary carries forward as context for the next.
Scope
The spec encodes the deliberative conversation, not the surrounding assembly program. Recruitment and stratified selection, the sponsor’s remit-setting and public promise, sourcing expert speakers and site visits, and final report formatting are out of scope — that is program design, not facilitated conversation. The chain assumes a remit and balanced information already exist, and hands its agreed recommendations back to that program.
Provenance and licence
Adapted from Facilitating Deliberation — A Practical Guide (Kimbra White, Nicole Hunter & Keith Greaves; MosaicLab, 2022), which MosaicLab and the AI & Democracy Foundation have made free to download. This is an independent OFL encoding of the deliberative arc, in our own words, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 and attributed to MosaicLab; it is not endorsed by them, and we are sharing it with MosaicLab and the AI & Democracy Foundation. Embedded frameworks — ORID, Kaner’s Diamond, the Love-it/Loathe-it scale — are credited to their originators in SOURCES.md. Status is draft: confirm faithful wording with MosaicLab before promoting to tested.