Decentralized Deliberation Standard
Plan, collect, and analyze — an open protocol for sovereign, verifiable, and interoperable public deliberation.
Why DDS?
Deliberation tools are siloed. A pol.is cluster can't hand off to a voting app without custom integration. Users must trust the platform's moderation with no flexibility and no way to verify results. When a provider disappears, communities lose their data and history.
DDS defines the shared layer: common schemas (Lexicons) on a common data stream (the AT Protocol Firehose). Any app reads any other app's deliberation data — no bilateral integrations. Analyzers re-run on public inputs and commit results on-chain. Users recover their identity and data from decentralized archives regardless of what any operator does.
Sovereign
You own your participation. Your cryptographic keys are yours — stored in an encrypted vault recoverable from decentralized archives even if every operator disappears.
Interoperable
Any app can build on DDS. No bilateral integrations, no walled gardens. One shared conversation legible to every frontend, every analyzer, every governance tool.
Verifiable
Publicly auditable by design. Anyone can re-run the analysis and compare against the on-chain commitment. Results are tamper-evident and permanently anchored — independent of any single operator.
Universal
From anonymous guest to cryptographic proof. Open to all, link-gated, or credential-verified. Email, phone, event ticket, ZK passport, EUDI wallet — apps choose what they accept per deliberation.
What can you build?
DDS is a substrate. The use cases are as broad as human deliberation itself.
Deliberation platforms
Opinion clustering à la pol.is. AI-facilitated dialogue in the style of Dembrane. Any structured conversation where surfacing consensus matters.
Surveys & consultations
Citizen assemblies, public comment periods, participatory budgeting. Collect input at scale while keeping results auditable and participants sovereign.
Voting & governance
Quadratic voting, ranked-choice, token-weighted decisions. DDS handles the deliberation layer and composes cleanly with dedicated voting protocols like Vocdoni.
Built on proven layers.
DDS doesn't reinvent the wheel. It assembles the right wheels in the right order. AT Protocol handles transport and identity — federated discoverability, persistent repositories, machine-enforceable schemas. Arweave, Filecoin, and Logos Storage archive every deliberation record permanently. Ethereum anchors analysis results on-chain, making them tamper-evident and forever auditable.
DDS focuses on deliberation. For binding on-chain votes, it composes cleanly with dedicated voting protocols like Vocdoni.
Explore the full spec →Build the future of collective decision-making.
DDS is an open working draft. Read the spec, join the discussion, implement the protocol.