We’re very pleased to share our latest news on the first project under our new Sortition Lab space - the Open Democratic Lottery Platform (OpenDLP).
Sortition Lab is where we develop tools and applications to support and enhance the work we and our partners do to upgrade democracy. Last year we secured funding to build OpenDLP, a brand new open-source digital platform that will make democratic lotteries more inclusive by automating the process for selecting participants for citizens' assemblies. Work began earlier this year on what will be a three-year project in total.
Since we started Sortition Foundation in 2017 we have run these sortition services/democratic lotteries for hundreds of deliberative events in partnership with local, regional and national governments, NGOs, the EU, and research and polling organisations around the world. In the course of this work we have expanded our knowledge and evidence base enormously on how best to run effective and efficient democratic lotteries.
OpenDLP was born out of our experiences and learnings in running sortition for these diverse events. In developing and constantly refining how we work we’ve identified how and where the process can be improved, automated and sped up.
We aim to start sharing beta versions of the platform in the coming months to partners and colleagues in the deliberative democracy space. If you would like to register your interest for this process please e-mail us at [email protected].