COMPARED
The Stanford Online Deliberation Platform comes from Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab and its Crowdsourced Democracy Team. It is a video platform for small groups, typically eight to fifteen people, built to run Deliberative Polling, the method James Fishkin developed: a representative sample of people is polled, deliberates in small groups with balanced briefing material and questions to competing experts, and is polled again. An automated moderator manages speaking queues and timed agendas so that everyone gets a fair turn, and many groups can meet in parallel. It has been used for national and city deliberations in Canada, Chile, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.
True Causes does a different job. Deliberative Polling measures what a representative public thinks after it has deliberated. True Causes produces a map of what causes what, built by the people who know the problem, with every link decided pair by pair.
| Stanford platform | True Causes | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | What would a representative public think after informed deliberation? | What causes what? Which causes are deepest? |
| How people take part | Live video in small groups, with an automated moderator | Writing and voting, at each person's own pace; an optional video call per group |
| Who takes part | Usually a random, representative sample | The people involved in the problem |
| What comes out | Opinion before and after, and the change between them | A map of causes, deepest first, with every disagreement kept on it |
| Scale | Many small groups in parallel | Rooms of up to 100 people free; any number of rooms on one question |
| Open source | No | Hosted, not open source. The results are open: a public room’s map, every claim (JSON) and every judged pair with its vote counts (CSV) can be read and downloaded without an account |
| Access | Through the Deliberative Democracy Lab | Anyone can open a room; free up to 100 people |
| Turn-taking | An automated moderator runs speaking queues | Round-robin turns: one card per round, your next waits for others; written, so nobody talks over anyone |
| Agenda and timing | Timed agendas in each group | Seven stages, closed by the steward or by a shared clock that keeps every room on the question in step |
| Moderation | Automated moderation and abuse prevention | An optional AI reading before a card or turn posts; if it reads as an attack on a person, the author alone is told and decides; admission rules decide who can join |
| Opinion before and after | Measured with surveys, the core of Deliberative Polling | Each member’s private stance before and after, in their own words, counted as minds moved |
| Languages | 40+ languages | Multilingual: the interface is in 57 languages; cards arriving from rooms in other languages are translated, with the original kept |
| Analytics | Real-time analytics | Live tallies for the steward, and the instance’s numbers at /stats |
When a public body needs to know what a representative sample of its population concludes about policy options after hearing the arguments, and needs that result to stand up to scrutiny.
When the question is diagnostic: why a problem persists. Deliberative Polling weighs options; True Causes identifies which causes the options should target.
They fit in sequence. Map the causes with the people closest to the problem; then put the options that target the deepest causes to a representative sample.
Checked in September 2026. Product names belong to their owners. If anything here about another product is out of date or unfair, write to hello@mg.truecauses.org and we will correct it.
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