Consultations collect opinions, and votes count them. Neither says why a problem keeps coming back, and the most visible complaint usually wins. A council ends up with a ranked list of grievances, most of them consequences of something nobody ranked.
True Causes is a structured deliberation platform. Residents write causes alone and unnamed, read and clarify each other’s, then judge in small rooms, pair by pair, whether one cause significantly influences another. A link goes on the map only when three quarters agree, and a split is published as a split. The method is Structured Democratic Dialogue, used in citizens’ dialogues for fifty years.
It grows the way a city does. Each neighbourhood, school or ward can open its own room on the same published question; a room can open to an email domain, so the staff of a council or the students of a university need nothing else to join; and every room’s map folds into one that shows which causes many rooms found on their own. Every link, vote count and room stays on the record, so anyone can read, check and cite the result.
Compared with Pol.is · Compared with Decidim · Deliberation platforms, feature by feature · How it works