Sustaining Deliberation in the Global South
01/Session
Antaraa Vasudev: An experimenter in the civic-technology space and Founder of Civis.Vote. She previously worked at the international non-profit Asia Society, where she handled policy-related public education programs and Track-II dialogues between ministers in India’s Union Council of Ministers and Kevin Rudd (former Prime Minister of Australia).
She also volunteered for the global civic-technology platform Democracy.Earth. She began her career studying how technology can drive civic engagement during India’s general elections, and is driven to help build trust between citizens and government through the use of technology. She is an Ashoka Fellow and part of Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 Class of 2021.
Civis – India: At Civis, they believe that laws made for citizens should be made with citizens. The organization gathers public feedback on draft laws and policies in India and shares that feedback with the government to help create better laws that meet citizens’ actual needs. To date, Civis has engaged 900,000 (9 lakh) citizens across India on more than 1,300 laws.
What allows deliberation to endure and shape local reality?
Problem diagnosis · User-centered design · Actor mapping and sustainability · Qualitative listening · Theory of change · Organizational and community resilience.
Sustaining Deliberation in the Global South
First open session of the Demo.Reset Mentorship Program, led by Antara Vasudev (Civis, India). Building on the “gears of democracy” analogy (citizens, government, media, and civil society), the session walks through a practical toolkit, so organizations from the Global South can design deliberative interventions that don’t depend on electoral or short-term funding cycles, but endure over time.
How you can explore…
- The iceberg metaphor and the “12 whys” rule to get to the root cause of a problem, not just its visible symptom.
- Building user personas from secondary research to understand beneficiaries’ motivations, fears, and preferred communication channels.
- The nouns & verbs exercise to precisely define what concrete action is expected from each actor (government, media, civil society).
- The fundamentals of a theory of change, illustrated with Civis’s (India) own model.
- The meaning of resilience, built collectively by the audience during the session.
This session explores what breaks deliberation and what allows it to endure. Also provides a practical diagnosis and design tools that enable organizations to build deliberative interventions that are sustainable, scalable, and grounded in local context, avoiding “universal recipes.”
- 12:12 - Introduction: conceptual framework for deliberative sustainability
- 27:58 - Setting the ground: shared challenges across contexts
- 36:01 - The gears of democracy: how citizens, government, media, and civil society move together?
- 61:01 - From diagnosis to design: overview of the toolkit
- 63:57 - The iceberg: finding the root cause of a problem
- 68:23 - Building user personas: who is "Maria," and why does she matter?
- 79:42 - Nouns & verbs: defining concrete actions for each actor
- 82:23 - Qualitative interviews: listening beyond the surface
- 90:50 - How do you bridge the gap between problem and solution?
- 99:00 - What does resilience mean to you?: the foundation of sustainable organizations