democracy.build

What It Is

Democratic Capabilities Gap Map is an open capability gap map launched by AI & Democracy Foundation. Its goal is to track the capabilities, research questions, and product gaps needed to build deliberative democratic systems suited to the AI era. It is not a traditional enterprise SaaS product; it is closer to a structured knowledge base, research database, and ecosystem roadmap for public governance, AI governance, and deliberative democracy.

Core Features and Structure

The map uses Dimensions as its top-level framework, covering quality dimensions of democratic processes such as Accountability, Deliberation, Informedness, Representativeness, Robustness, and Scalability. Each dimension contains Capabilities and is linked to Resources, Goals, Research Questions, and Product Gaps. The site also provides evaluation criteria such as maturity, importance, neglectedness, opportunity, and cross-country applicability. Product gaps are assessed by Impact and Scale, helping researchers, funders, and builders judge priorities.

Pricing, Deployment, and Developer Support

The crawled text does not mention plans, pricing, payment methods, free trials, or enterprise service details. In terms of deployment, it currently appears to be accessible as a web-based resource, and it provides large HTML and JSON data files, such as gap-map-v2026-jun.json, which are suitable for script-based processing, AI retrieval, or building derivative applications. The text does not show a formal API, SDK, authentication mechanism, self-hosting capability, or SLA.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are a clear content structure and broad coverage of key democratic process issues, from representativeness, informedness, and transparency to scalability and resistance to manipulation. The content is also manually curated by the team and domain experts, giving it value as a research reference. The drawbacks are also clear: it lacks the account systems, team permissions, third-party integrations, data security and compliance information, and customer support details commonly found in SaaS products. The scoring system is also explicitly described by the site as based on subjective judgment, making it better suited as a starting point for discussion rather than an authoritative conclusion.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for democratic governance researchers, public policy institutions, AI governance teams, foundations, and builders looking for product opportunities. For users in China, the text does not provide information on accessibility, payment, or localization, so China access can only be marked as unknown. Since the content is mainly in English, use in a local policy context would also need to be adapted or supplemented with tools related to public participation, government collaboration, or survey research in China.