Oct 21, 2026 · Jon Garfunkel
I developed the Participatory Governance Framework (“PGF”) while helping a volunteer association consider how to move its work out of meetings and email threads. Its member groups needed to coordinate with other groups in the network, keep track of their decisions, and follow through on what they agreed to do. Some members knew modern collaboration tools from their workplaces, but those tools are rarely built for, or appropriately priced for, volunteer groups.
I was looking for a way to compare tools based on what they provided, and . Research firms like Gartner and Forrester tend to look at software marketed to and used by commercial firms; they don’t look at lower-cost systems. Within the framework, I’ve produced a scorecard against 33 popular tools in the deliberation and collaboration spaces.
| Model | Purpose | Structure |
|---|---|---|
| McGrath task circumplex (1984) | Classify group tasks for research | 8 task types on two axes, unordered |
| Metagov deliberative stages | Tag deliberative tools for interoperability | 8 stages in a cycle |
| King elements of deliberation (2025) | Compare online deliberation platforms | 9 elements, explicitly unordered |
| Schirch deliberative tech stack | Match tools to deliberative processes in polarized settings | 8 layers, from a foundational layer up to decision-making |
| Participatory Governance Framework | Help governance bodies select tools | 5 workflow domains in 3 anchors, plus Foundation |
PGF scores five workflow domains: Inquiry Handling, Task & Project Management, Sense Making & Deliberation, Ideation & Proposal Development, and Voting & Decision Affirmation. A Foundation domain scores general collaboration features such as membership, documents, notifications, and search. Dependencies are scored under Task Management and ranking under Voting.
The other models center on deliberation; PGF describes participatory governance.
A widely cited definition, from Bächtiger and colleagues (2018), treats deliberation as mutual communication that weighs preferences, values, and interests on matters of common concern. That definition covers discussion. It doesn’t cover the sides: questions arrive, or how decisions are carried out.
Participatory governance is the larger frame. Fung and Wright’s Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (2003) treats deliberation as one component, alongside bottom-up participation and tying action to discussion. In PGF terms, deliberation occupies the Discovery anchor. PGF adds the intake that feeds it, the decision that ends it, and the execution that follows.
Metagov, King, and Schirch all center on deliberation. Metagov names Deciding and Actuating stages, but its catalogued tools cluster in the deliberative middle. King’s model ends at outcome generation, and Schirch’s stack at decision-making. PGF covers the full governance workflow, from the first question to the reported result.
There may be a simple reason for this focus. Inquiry handling and task management are served by mature products, such as help desks and project trackers. Deliberation is the hard, unsolved problem, so it has drawn most of the academic attention. An adopter sees it differently. A volunteer board does not want a deliberation tool plus a help desk plus a task tracker. It wants the whole system. (“Make me one with everything.”)
Joseph McGrath’s model is here as a theoretical reference point; it was conceived well before online tools came into common use. He proposed the task circumplex in Groups: Interaction and Performance (1984) to classify the tasks groups perform, so researchers could compare group performance across tasks. Its two axes run from conceptual to behavioral and from cooperation to conflict. The four quadrants are positions on a circle.
| McGrath quadrant | Task types | PGF domain |
|---|---|---|
| Generate | Planning, creativity | Ideation & Proposal Development |
| Choose | Intellective, decision-making | Sense Making; Voting & Decision Affirmation |
| Negotiate | Cognitive conflict, mixed-motive | Sense Making & Deliberation; Voting & Decision Affirmation |
| Execute | Contests, performances | Task & Project Management |
Metagov’s Deliberative Tools Gallery describes governance as a cycle: do, learn, decide, repeat. It calls the learn-and-decide portion the deliberative arc and divides it into eight stages. It uses those stages to tag tools from its interoperability cohort.
| Metagov stage | What it covers | PGF domain |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluating | Reflecting on current conditions | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Agenda setting | Framing, prioritizing, identifying stakeholders | Sense Making (framing); ranking scored under Voting |
| Eliciting | Participants reflecting on their own values and experience | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Learning | Evidence, argument mapping, fact-checking | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Deliberating | Explaining and arguing positions | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Proposing | Ideating and forming proposals | Ideation & Proposal Development |
| Deciding | Ranking, voting, integrating objections, consent | Voting & Decision Affirmation |
| Actuating | Carrying out decisions, tracking status | Task & Project Management |
The main differences:
Martin King’s “An emerging conceptual model comparing the deliberative nature of online deliberation platforms” appears in Public Deliberation in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2025). His model is the closest to PGF in purpose. He breaks deliberation into nine elements so that online deliberation platforms can be compared. Like PGF, it describes what a process needs and stays neutral on how a tool does it. He applies it to Pol.is and finds structured support for four of the nine elements: focus, expression, sentiment, and meta-deliberation. Everything else happens outside the platform.
| King element | PGF domain |
|---|---|
| Initiation | Foundation (membership, invitations); partly Inquiry Handling |
| Focus and scope setting | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Knowledge and skills | Sense Making & Deliberation; Foundation (documents) |
| Content/Expressions | Sense Making; Ideation & Proposal Development |
| Logic | Ideation & Proposal Development (related and duplicate proposals) |
| Sentiment | Sense Making; Voting & Decision Affirmation |
| Critique/Change | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Meta-deliberation | No single domain (moderation cuts across) |
| Outcome generation | Voting & Decision Affirmation |
| (none) | Task & Project Management |
The main differences:
Lisa Schirch of the University of Notre Dame co-chairs the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion. Its Deliberative Tech Hub presents a deliberative tech stack: layers of public discourse goals, each with example tools. The stack serves groups using deliberative technology to build social cohesion in polarized settings, war zones, and other places where democratic participation is hard. PGF is about technology for governance.
| Stack layer | Goals | PGF domain |
|---|---|---|
| Foundational | Safety, identity and data privacy, recruiting participants | Foundation |
| Recruiting and Sortition | Bridging sortition, valuing marginalized voices | Foundation (membership); sortition has no PGF equivalent |
| Humanizing | Prosocial norms and coaching, exchanging experiences | No single domain (cuts across, like King’s meta-deliberation) |
| Agenda Setting | Identifying issues, framing the discussion | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Fact Building | Sharing information, identifying gaps | Sense Making & Deliberation; Foundation (documents) |
| Sensemaking | Mapping opinions, values, perception gaps, polarity management | Sense Making & Deliberation |
| Weighing Scenarios | Imagining futures, weighing tradeoffs | Ideation & Proposal Development |
| Decision-Making | Proposal deliberation, voting, participatory budgeting | Ideation; Voting & Decision Affirmation |
The main differences:
None of the other models includes inquiry handling. They start once a group has a question in hand. PGF is an outlier here, and we think the outlier position is correct.
Outside stakeholders have questions, and they send them in. The channels are familiar:
For many people these channels are the only way to participate. The forum post or the email is their whole stake in the process.
The hosts of these channels usually treat them as separate from the rest of the governance chain. Support forums are staffed as customer service. Facebook groups are run as community management. Neither is wired to the people who set priorities and make decisions.
The channels also fail in two opposite ways. Some stakeholders have no channel at all, so their concerns never arrive. Other channels are over-generative: high volume, many duplicates, and no path to a response. Both failures come from the same gap. Intake is not connected to deliberation, decisions, or execution.
Most deliberative processes begin when organizers convene a group and pose a question. King’s Initiation element describes this. Inquiry handling covers input the body did not ask for: the question that arrives on its own schedule, in its own words. A governing body that only hears what it solicits will miss the issues it did not know to ask about.
In PGF, inquiry handling is both the entry point and the return point of the workflow. A question comes in. It is routed to sense making, to a proposal, or straight to a task. When the work is done, the answer goes back to the person who asked.
That loop is what makes the other domains accountable. It is also why PGF’s measures of success start with intake: how many ideas and questions were heard, from how many people, and how many got a response.
Inquiry handling pairs with task management in the Execution anchor for a practical reason. Both are queues of items that need an owner and a status. Mature tools exist for both. What is missing is the connection to the deliberative work in between.
The field now has several models of the same work and no shared vocabulary for describing products. Each model above finds the same pattern: tools cluster in the deliberative middle, and intake and execution go unaddressed. Product teams can change that. We ask for three things.
The PGF question set and scorecard are open to that group to use, revise, or replace.