Facilitating Deliberation

Why this book

The Big Book of Facilitating Deliberation: A Practical Guide is MosaicLab’s working textbook of deliberative-democracy practice — Kimbra White, Nicole Hunter, and Keith Greaves (2023), the directors of MosaicLab. The book reads like a handbook for practitioners running structured deliberative processes in the field, not a theoretical text about them.

The book is structured the way working facilitators work. It separates the macro design of a deliberation (the structural decisions made weeks ahead) from the micro design of a single session (the choices made minute-to-minute in the room), and treats readiness assessment — whether a commissioning body is actually ready for binding deliberation — as a category of its own.

A facilitator running an actual engagement doesn’t have time to flip through a long reference. They need the relevant template, scoped to their question, with the standing context preserved.

What we built

facilitating-deliberation-mcp — an MCP server that exposes the book as 12 callable tools across four divisions: macro design, micro design, readiness assessment, and in-room activity selection. Built for the practitioner mid-engagement: someone in the middle of designing a process and looking for the right structural template, or someone running a session tomorrow morning and choosing the right activity for the room they have.

Specific tool names, catalog entries, and workflows are available to authorized users.

Why this is private

The book is in copyright (MosaicLab, 2023), and the artifact embeds substantial structured content from it — beyond what could be released freely without explicit permission. Building it as a public artifact would require a license from the rights-holder. Until that conversation happens, the MCP is available on a request-access basis to facilitators, deliberation organizations, and commissioning bodies whose use case justifies the license arrangement.

If that’s you, get in touch.