At its core, Demognostics is a gargantuan research undertaking that involves meta-analyses of the published literature on hundreds of democratic institutional arrangements. These analyses will take considerable careful planning, thinking, and time, and involve many experts from diverse disciplines, including our academic steering committee.

To prepare for the analyses, we will develop in-house typologies of values and "symptoms," review theory about their causes, and collect reams of empirical evidence (academic studies) on the effect of institutions and reform.

We will combine the results of the meta-analyses into an institutional arrangement scoring matrix, which will undergird our democracy algorithm. This matrix will be vetted and reviewed by a set of independent political science, law, and history experts.  

Using our scoring matrix, we will develop an algorithm to accurately (but imprecisely) (1) estimate the cumulative impact of multiple institutional changes on modern-day U.S. democracy, and (2) dynamically characterize the values represented in a set of institutional arrangements. 

The chatbot will encourage users to go beyond their first comments to dig a little deeper. It will connect their thoughts to concepts from political theory without departing from its natural language mission. 

The algorithm connects users' complaints about democracy with theory and data on real world democracies. It will be the workhorse of Demognostics and will ground our chatbot.

To facilitate natural conversations in users' own lexicon, Dr. Dahl will be the face of a large language model chatbot (a generative pre-trained transformers, "GPT") trained on popular literature and social media on democracy topics. The training of the model will be overseen by human political scientists, historians, and psychologists so that Dr. Dahl will not confidently assert believable falsehoods. 

The content of these conversations will be parsed through our democracy algorithm, which connects popular sentiment to democratic theory and political science empiricism. 

We plan to launch in English initially, with a longer term goal of expanding to Spanish. 

To ensure Demognostics resonates with a younger, often skeptical audience, we will involve educators from school and college in every step of the process, including in our steering committee.  

We will engage UX specialists to develop our user testing plan. We expect to employ a mix of techniques, including workshops, labs, and A/B testing, on the general public, politically engaged citizens, and in mock and live high school and college classroom settings.  

We will draw on insights from psychology to design the transition from the "symptom" to "treatment" phase in the diagnostics mode so it effectively harnesses outrage rather than contributing to increased cynicism. 

We know the app can have little impact without an exceptional user experience. It cannot be boring, inauthentic, or cringe. It'll be tough to achieve the right balance, but we're dedicated to trying our darndest (cringe!).