Deliberation

The deliberation lexicons (deliberation, deliberationStatement, deliberationVote, deliberationOutcome) name a process. The belief / recommendation lexicons name results. They are deliberately distinct.

What each lexicon is for

flowchart LR
    DEL[deliberation] -->|topic, status| DST[deliberationStatement]
    DST -->|subject of| DVO[deliberationVote]
    DEL -->|tallied as| DOU[deliberationOutcome]
    DOU -->|adopts| DST

• dev.idiolect.deliberation declares a community-scoped topic. Carries the owning community, an open-enum classification (question / proposal / grievance / ...), an open-enum status (open / closed / tabled / adopted / ...), and an optional pointer to the resulting outcome.
• dev.idiolect.deliberationStatement is one statement made inside a deliberation. Carries the deliberation it belongs to, the text, an open-enum classification (claim / proposal / dissent / clarification / ...), and an anonymous flag with an optional authoredOn service-DID surrogate.
• dev.idiolect.deliberationVote is a vote on a statement. Carries the statement (as a strongRef), an open-enum stance (defaults to agree / pass / disagree), an optional weight integer, and an optional rationale.
• dev.idiolect.deliberationOutcome is an observer-published tally. Carries the deliberation, per-stance counts per statement, the computedAt timestamp, and an optional list of adopted statements.

Why this is separate from belief and recommendation

A dev.idiolect.belief is a community's standing claim about a lens or schema. A dev.idiolect.recommendation is an opinionated path with conditions. Both are settled artifacts: they record what a community thinks, not how a community arrived there.

Deliberation is the process. The four lexicons together let consumers see what the community considered, who voted, what the tally was, and which statements were adopted, before reading the resulting belief or recommendation. A consumer that only ever sees the belief is in the same position as a consumer of any asserted truth; a consumer that wants context can follow the deliberation.

Maps to Acorn's assembly records

Bluesky's Acorn project publishes the same shape under community.blacksky.assembly.{conversation, statement, vote}. The four idiolect lexicons are shaped so a future bridge to Acorn's records can be lossless. Stance, classification, and status are open-enum slugs resolved through community-published vocabularies; Acorn's -1 | 0 | 1 stances become vocab nodes.

The bridge crate is downstream work and is not shipped. The lexicons are; they were designed against the assembly records as a forcing function.

How the tally is produced

A deliberationOutcome is observer-published, not voter-published. The fold (in idiolect-observer) walks every deliberationVote that points at a statement in the deliberation, tallies stances per statement, and emits one outcome record per (deliberation, window) tuple.

Multiple observers can publish concurrent outcomes for the same deliberation; consumers can require quorum across observers before adopting an outcome. This is the same shape as the observation fold over encounters.

Open-enum extension

The shipped vocabularies seed canonical defaults:

• deliberation-classifications (question, proposal, grievance, process, position, ...).
• statement-classifications (claim, proposal, dissent, clarification, question, ...).
• deliberation-statuses (open, closed, tabled, adopted, rejected, ...).
• vote-stances (agree, pass, disagree, with polar_opposite_of edges).

A community publishing its own vocab over any of these slugs can extend the value set without modifying the lexicons. Records referencing the community's vocab through the corresponding *Vocab field resolve through the extended slug set.

What this is not

The deliberation lexicons do not implement Polis-style clustering, quadratic voting, or any specific decision procedure. They name the artifacts of a deliberation; the procedure that produces the artifacts (and the procedure that adopts an outcome) is the community's choice.

A community that wants quadratic voting publishes a vote-weights vocabulary and uses the optional weight field on deliberationVote to carry its scheme. A community that wants delegation publishes a delegations mapping (out-of-band or in its own lexicon) and lets observers fold votes along the delegation chain. The substrate carries the votes; the procedure carries the meaning.