FIDE North America has released a Theory of Change for Citizens' Assemblies — a collaboratively developed field framework built with input from 18 organizations and more than 80 contributors, incorporating over 200 public comments and workshopped at Democracy R&D in Brussels and the National Conference on Citizenship in Washington. The document identifies three core problems that citizens' assemblies address — limited electoral accountability, unrepresentative decision-making, and government inability to resolve contentious issues — and traces outcomes across seven vectors, from individual empowerment and inclusion to policy impact and resilient democratic infrastructure, with explicit attention to the risks and enabling conditions for each. Framed as a living document that will evolve with the field, it provides practitioners with design guidance, funders with a clearer picture of plausible impact, and researchers with structured hypotheses to test. This release directly advances NCDD's mission by equipping the dialogue and deliberation field with shared standards, common language, and an honest account of what citizens' assemblies can and cannot accomplish.

The Kettering Foundation's Democracy and Community focus area will host the 2026 Summer Institute of Civic Studies at its Dayton, Ohio campus August 2–8 — an intensive interdisciplinary seminar bringing together faculty, graduate students, and civic practitioners for a week of seminar-style discussion, community engagement, and deep inquiry into the literature and practice of civic studies and democratic community-building. The Institute, which has been taught and hosted in locations across the U.S. and Europe since 2009, centers framing questions about collaborative problem-solving, value disagreements, power disparities, and the institutional conditions for civic engagement — topics central to the dialogue and deliberation field. Participation is free, with food provided and limited travel stipends available, though the 2026 application window has closed. This gathering represents a vital node in the intellectual and practitioner network that NCDD's mission supports, and NCDD members are encouraged to follow the Kettering Foundation for future SICS opportunities.

A May 2026 research article from Carnegie California by nonresident scholar Dr. Micah Weinberg examines the genuine democratic possibilities of AI-augmented deliberation — and the governance infrastructure that does not yet exist to realize them responsibly. Drawing on deliberative theory and real-world cases, including the UK's AI Safety Summit consultation and Fort Collins, Colorado's civic engagement process, Weinberg argues that AI synthesis tools can meaningfully address the long-standing tension between scale and quality in deliberative processes, expanding participation while preserving minority voices. However, he identifies a structural governance gap: democratic institutions currently lack the staffing, procurement standards, audit capacity, and legal frameworks to ensure that AI-augmented deliberation serves democratic rather than commercial imperatives, and a near-total standards vacuum leaves deliberative AI effectively ungoverned. The article calls for investment in democratic governance infrastructure — standard-setting, institutional capacity-building, and open-source platform development — as the decisive near-term priority, arguing that the question is not whether AI-augmented deliberation will become a fixture of governance, but whose interests it will serve and whose voices it will faithfully carry.

The Year in Deliberation 2025, published by Democracy R&D — the largest global network dedicated to deliberative democracy, with members across 58 countries — offers a comprehensive annual state-of-the-field report examining the most significant trends, cases, and challenges shaping citizens' assemblies and deliberative practice worldwide. The report explores five practitioner-identified trends, including the role of AI in deliberation, the connection between deliberative processes and democratic resilience, expanding representation across marginalized communities, deliberation beyond government contexts, and the sustainability of funding in an era of cuts. Grounded in 13 expert interviews and 16 field-advancing case studies — including a landmark U.S. example in Fort Collins, Colorado — the report offers both analytical depth and actionable insight for practitioners navigating a rapidly evolving field. This publication directly serves NCDD's mission by providing the dialogue and deliberation community with an authoritative, globally informed resource for understanding where the field stands and what it must do next.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation offers a foundational introduction to the two core practices at the heart of its network's work: dialogue and deliberation. The post explains dialogue as a process for building genuine understanding across differences — not winning arguments, but hearing experiences — and deliberation as the structured examination of options and trade-offs that allows communities to make better decisions together. Drawing on the insight that moving from talk to decision requires trust as a foundation, the piece makes the case that these processes are most powerful in sequence and most necessary now, when polarization and distrust are eroding the civic spaces where communities once worked through hard things together. This explainer serves NCDD's mission by equipping new and returning visitors with a clear, accessible entry point into the dialogue and deliberation field and the network that supports it.

Dialogue Vanderbilt hosted The Dialogue CoLab on May 21–22, 2026, bringing together nearly thirty colleges and universities — ranging from Ivy League institutions to community colleges — for a national working summit focused on practical strategies for advancing campus dialogue, deliberation, and civil discourse. Directed by faculty director Sarah Igo and supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the CoLab is structured as a peer learning exchange rather than a traditional conference, enabling institutions with widely different student populations and campus cultures to honestly compare what they are trying, what students are responding to, and where challenges persist. Participating campuses have implemented a range of approaches — from dialogue-integrated student employment programs to faculty fellowships and structured deliberation models — and the summit creates space for those experiments to inform one another across institutional contexts. For NCDD members in higher education, the Dialogue CoLab offers both a model of field-building peer exchange and evidence of the growing momentum behind campus-based dialogue and deliberation work nationwide.

Carnegie UK's Engaging Democracy programme has released Parliamentarians' Perspectives on Deliberative Democracy, a polling study conducted by Savanta in late 2025 surveying elected representatives across the UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament, Senedd, and Northern Ireland Assembly on their awareness of, attitudes toward, and openness to deliberative democratic processes. The research finds that while elected representatives across all jurisdictions display cautious openness to deliberative approaches, significant barriers persist — including concerns about legitimacy, role duplication, and institutional capacity — and that awareness and experience vary substantially by jurisdiction and political affiliation. A consistent and actionable finding across the report is that direct experience of deliberative processes tends to reduce scepticism, pointing to education and structured exposure as critical pathways for the field. The report is essential reading for NCDD members working at the intersection of deliberative democracy and formal governance, offering both empirical grounding and concrete recommendations for advancing deliberative practice within legislative institutions.

James Madison University's James Madison Center for Civic Engagement and the National Issues Forums Institute have launched the Centers for Civic Life and Faculty Fellows program, a federally funded four-year initiative inviting colleges and universities nationwide to build campus deliberation hubs and develop faculty expertise in deliberative pedagogy and nonpartisan issue guide creation. Selected institutions receive up to $19,000 in combined campus and fellowship support, along with training, assessment tools, and integration into a growing national network of deliberation-centered campuses. The program draws on JMU's proven Better Conversations Together model, which has embedded deliberative forums in the first-year student experience, and extends that approach to campuses across the country. For NCDD members in higher education, this fellowship offers a rare, well-resourced opportunity to institutionalize the skills and practices of dialogue and deliberation at the heart of the undergraduate civic experience.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation announces the conclusion of Lori Britt's tenure as Board Chair and welcomes Christian Ohonba, Logan Steppan, and Peter Schutz as incoming Interim Board Chairs, marking a significant moment of leadership transition for the organization. Britt, Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Constructive Advocacy and Dialogue at James Madison University, brought deep scholarly and practitioner expertise to her board leadership, contributing to NCDD's credibility and capacity across her tenure. The three incoming chairs bring complementary strengths in systems-centered equity work, community and policy facilitation, and grassroots civic engagement — together reflecting the diversity of practice and perspective that NCDD's network represents. This transition reinforces NCDD's commitment to distributed, values-driven leadership in service of a stronger dialogue and deliberation field.

​The National Issues Forums Institute has welcomed Christine Fernando as its new Communications and Creative Coordinator, bringing to the role a distinguished journalism career that includes national democracy reporting for the Associated Press and coverage of civil rights and democratic institutions for USA TODAY and other outlets. Fernando's approach to storytelling — grounded in trust-building across difference, clarity amid complexity, and centering lived civic experience — translates directly into strengthening the way NIFI communicates deliberative practice to communities, partners, and the broader public. In her new role, she will help shape NIFI's narrative presence as the organization moves toward the launch of What's Next, America? ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary. Her hire represents a meaningful investment in the field's ability to connect deliberative democracy to the communities it most needs to reach, advancing NCDD's mission to strengthen public engagement and democratic participation.