New Member Highlight: OneMind & Joel Castro, CEO of OneMind.Life LLC

​Joel Castro, CEO of OneMind.Life LLC developed OneMind, a free, open-source consensus-building platform for groups of 5 to 5,000. It enables participants to move from individual perspectives to collective wisdom through anonymous structured rounds of proposing and rating. The win-twice convergence mechanism ensures genuine agreement, and built-in translation supports cross-language collaboration. The tool addresses facilitator dependency, time constraints, scalability issues, language barriers, and binary thinking through self-facilitating processes that work synchronously or asynchronously. It captures nuanced preferences on 0-100 scales and builds chains of thought where each convergence becomes the foundation for the next. This resource advances NCDD’s mission by providing practitioners with digital infrastructure for participatory decision-making that preserves deliberative values of equal voice, genuine listening, and collective wisdom. It enables practical applications, including real-time workshop facilitation, conflict resolution, group discovery, DEI discussions with anonymous input, and asynchronous deliberation.

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OneMind is a free, open-source consensus-building tool that helps groups move from sharing personal perspectives toward collective wisdom and common ground through anonymous, structured rounds of proposing and rating. Designed to scale from 5 to 5,000 participants, the platform enables groups to converge on shared direction through a win-twice mechanism ensuring genuine consensus: participants submit propositions, rate all submissions on a 0-100 scale, and continue refining until the group agrees that no proposition surpasses the previous winner. Each convergence becomes the foundation for the next, building a chain of thought that progressively moves groups in a shared direction without facilitator dependency, time constraints limiting asynchronous participation, or language barriers preventing cross-cultural collaboration.

The platform addresses core challenges facing dialogue and deliberation practitioners by creating structured processes that work synchronously during meetings or asynchronously over time, removing social dynamics that often skew participation. Anonymous proposing and rating encourages honest input without bias based on status, role, or identity, while the 0-100 rating scale captures nuanced preferences beyond binary yes/no thinking. Built-in real-time translation enables cross-language consensus, and the open-source codebase (available at github.com/onemindlife/onemind.life) allows adaptation for specific contexts. Practical applications include real-time facilitation during workshops, conflict resolution between opposing parties, group discovery without predetermined agendas, DEI discussions where anonymous input allows participation without bias, and asynchronous deliberation enabling alignment over days or weeks rather than requiring real-time presence.

OneMind embodies NCDD's core values by structuring collaboration through rounds that help groups build on each other's ideas, ensuring inclusivity where everyone proposes and rates with equal opportunity to influence conversation, capturing evolving group thinking over time unlike static polls, and facilitating movement from individual perspectives to shared understanding. The win-twice convergence mechanism provides a clear path forward when groups struggle to identify common ground, while the ranking system's nuance prevents the oversimplification that binary voting often imposes on complex questions. For practitioners seeking digital tools that support rather than replace facilitation skills, OneMind offers infrastructure for participatory decision-making that preserves the deliberative values of equal voice, genuine listening, and collective wisdom while addressing scalability and accessibility challenges inherent in traditional face-to-face methods.

Joel Castro invites NCDD members to explore OneMind by visiting onemind.life to create a group and start a consensus session, with no signup required for participants—just share the group link. A built-in tutorial walks users through the process, and a demo is available at onemind.life/demo. Castro offers to provide live walkthroughs for NCDD members and welcomes feedback on how the tool performs in dialogue and deliberation work.
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Contact: [email protected]
Platform: https://onemind.life
Tutorial: https://onemind.life/tutorial
Demo: https://onemind.life/demo
Code: https://github.com/onemindlife/onemind.life