Democs

Democs is a card game-like format for public discussion of contemporary political issues. The name is derived from DEliberative Meetings Of CitizenS, and the format was originally developed by the New Economics Foundation. Democs has been applied to discussion of nanotechnology in a number of forms.

Democs was developed by Perry Walker of the UK “think and do tank” New Economics Foundation (NEF) in 2002, with funding from the Wellcome Trust. As a process, it draws on concepts of deliberation and dialogue, but applies these to settings in which anyone can participate, in any location. While participatory and deliberative democracy activities—such as consensus conferences or citizens juries—are usually highly structured and tightly organized, Democs enables citizens to self-organize and to discuss controversial issues whenever and wherever they wish. Democs has also been adapted for use in schools, with a number of topics (including climate change, genetically modified (GM) food, and stem cell research) developed into packs that incorporate teacher's guides and age-specific information.

Democs kits provide background information on a particular topic and a structure for a deliberative discussion. They can also be used to develop recommendations and to feed these back to a central organizer, such as policy makers in a particular arena. They do this through sets of cards that trigger conversation. Typically, a Democs kit will contain information cards (presenting basic facts about the topic), issue cards (suggesting some of the key social and ethical issues or the opinions the topic provokes), story cards (giving fictional characters' experiences or perspectives), and question and answer cards (asking questions that are at the heart of the topic, and providing different answers to them). There are also blank cards for players to write their own comments on. A game will take around 90 minutes, and will involve players being dealt different cards, discussing these, selecting and clustering together what the group decides are important issues, and voting on possible solutions to these. Democs is designed for groups of four to eight people (or larger groups subdivided into these numbers).