​DemocracyNext, the democratic innovation nonprofit led by founder Claudia Chwalisz, has released Deliberative Muscles & AI, a paper examining how deliberation technology can strengthen rather than erode citizens' capacities to deliberate. Written by Chwalisz, Sammy McKinney, Jorim Theuns, and Eugene Yi, the paper reframes deliberative assemblies not as recommendation-producing machines but as spaces where people build the cognitive, relational, and dispositional capacities democratic life depends on. Its central argument is that whether AI helps or harms deliberation is a matter of design, and it offers a typology of seven "deliberative muscles" alongside a practical framework for judging whether a given tool strengthens or substitutes for each one. For the dialogue and deliberation field, the paper is a rigorous guide for practitioners, funders, and technologists weighing how to bring AI into participatory work without hollowing out its human core.

​The OECD's Public Governance Directorate, in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, has released Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Citizen Participation, a report examining how AI tools can support and strengthen participatory and deliberative processes. Drawing on 50 real-world use cases across 22 countries, the report offers a typology of nine AI applications, from sense-making and translation to facilitation and moderation, that help governments and practitioners navigate an emerging and fast-moving field. It pairs this practical framework with a clear-eyed analysis of the risks, including exclusion, loss of nuance, and overreliance, and it insists throughout that AI should support rather than replace skilled facilitators and genuine citizen engagement. For the dialogue and deliberation community, the report is a timely resource for thinking rigorously about where technology can deepen participation and where human judgment must remain at the center of democratic practice.

The Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University recently facilitated a deliberative process with the City of New Westminster's Community Advisory Assembly, Canada's first ongoing deliberative mini-public tasked with advising municipal staff and Council. Working with 36 randomly selected members chosen to reflect the city's demographics, the Centre guided the Assembly through a structured learning-and-deliberation model to develop recommendations for New Westminster's first Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Plan. The process paired technical climate information from City staff with residents' lived experience, showing how facilitated dialogue can turn a complex, policy-heavy subject into actionable community guidance. By demonstrating that a demographically representative body can meaningfully shape climate policy, this work offers a replicable model for practitioners seeking to deepen public participation and strengthen deliberative democracy at the local level.

​Project Pericles' Deliberative Dialogue Module is a set of open, adaptable teaching tools that help college faculty connect course content to real civic questions and guide students through structured deliberation on public issues. Built on the Kettering Foundation's understanding of deliberative dialogue as a way to think together rather than to debate or force consensus, the module frames classroom conversation as preparation for civic and electoral participation. It includes a faculty facilitator guide, a library of sixteen discussion topics spanning disciplines from computer science to public health, and guidance on crafting non-partisan issue stances that open multiple perspectives rather than collapsing into an us-versus-them split. The approach draws on evaluated workshop models and centers skills the dialogue field values, including active listening, critical thinking, and finding common ground across difference. By treating every discipline as a doorway to public questions, the module extends deliberative practice into higher education in a way that speaks directly to NCDD's mission of strengthening democracy through better public conversation.

In "Realizing the Potential Gains of AI-Enabled Deliberative Democracy," Micah Weinberg, Nonresident Scholar at Carnegie California, argues that the main obstacle to AI-supported public deliberation is not technology but the weakness of the democratic institutions meant to govern it. His central claim reframes a familiar problem: the tools to run large-scale, accessible, evidence-based deliberation already exist, while the staffing, procurement rules, audit capacity, and standards needed to deploy them responsibly do not. Weinberg identifies concrete gains AI could deliver, including deliberation at the scale of tens of thousands without losing depth, reduced informational asymmetries among participants, wider inclusion, and stronger accountability between citizen input and policy outcomes, alongside the risks that threaten each. For practitioners, the piece offers a governance-first agenda, including certification standards, participant-facing audit mechanisms, and publicly governed open-source platforms, rather than a technical wish list. Its framing speaks directly to NCDD's mission by insisting that the legitimacy of deliberation depends on human and institutional choices, not on the sophistication of the tools.

The Close Up Foundation, in partnership with the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, Generation Lab, and the Hoover Institution's Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, convened NextGen Roundtable: Decision 2026, a four-day deliberative forum that brought 400 first-time voters to Washington, DC, ahead of the midterm elections. Selected to reflect the country's demographic, geographic, and ideological diversity, participants deliberated—not debated—policy questions on artificial intelligence, immigration, democracy, and America's global role in small, moderated groups. Building on the America in One Room model, the forum drew on evidence that structured deliberation can increase civic knowledge, reduce polarization, and strengthen trust across differences. A closing exercise using the Civic Profile tool encouraged students to situate their civic values against national benchmarks and enduring tensions such as liberty versus equality, rather than party labels. For the NCDD network, the event offers a practical, evidence-based model for youth deliberation that demonstrates how disagreement and mutual respect can coexist.

​Harvard's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, part of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, has highlighted two resources of direct interest to dialogue and deliberation practitioners within its broader summer reading collection: a course on designing democratic engagement for the AI era, and a fellow spotlight examining how city charters can serve as a foundation for deliberative democracy. The course, developed with InnovateUS and The GovLab, trains public servants to run meaningful community engagement processes and to use artificial intelligence responsibly in support of that work. The spotlight piece argues that tools such as citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, and town meetings should be written directly into municipal governing structures, institutionalizing deliberative practice rather than treating it as a one-off initiative. Together, these resources offer practitioners both a hands-on training pathway and a structural argument for embedding deliberation into how cities actually govern, work that speaks directly to NCDD's mission of strengthening democratic participation through durable, practical tools.

Everyday Democracy is hosting "Doing Democracy: Why Deliberate in a Time of Democratic Crisis?" today, a virtual panel examining whether dialogue and collaborative decision-making still hold value amid democratic backsliding and rising polarization. The event brings together practitioners who have translated community dialogue into concrete policy shifts, including a city's move toward non-police crisis response, and a national coordinator of participatory democracy efforts, grounding the discussion in lived organizing experience rather than theory. Attendees will hear how deliberation functions in high-stakes, cross-difference settings, including interracial and interfaith conflict, offering practical insight into where collaborative decision-making succeeds and where its limits lie. The event's inquiry into deliberation's role during democratic crisis speaks directly to NCDD's mission of strengthening democratic participation and equipping the dialogue and deliberation field for this political moment.

Scaling Democratic Innovations: Features of Effective Catalyst Organisations & Future Frontiers, a new research paper from DemocracyNext authored by Claudia Chwalisz and Sammy McKinney, examines the organizations that intentionally drive the expansion of citizens' assemblies and deliberative practices in their regions — distilling six features of effective scaling catalysts, analyzing the tensions and trade-offs they navigate, and identifying five frontiers for future practice. The paper surfaces two critical challenges facing the field: coordination in increasingly crowded democratic innovation ecosystems and the precariousness of short-term, project-based funding, which undermines the long-term relationships and infrastructure work that scaling requires. For funders, it calls for five- to ten-year grants supporting ecosystem building; for practitioners, it offers a framework for understanding what makes scaling work and where the field is headed. This research directly advances NCDD's mission by providing the dialogue and deliberation community with rigorous, actionable insights into how deliberative democracy spreads, what sustains it, and what investments the field most urgently needs.