Rapid Think Tanks (RTTs): An Atomic Approach to Accelerating Collective Deliberation

Collective deliberation manifests across society in multiple forms, encompassing parliamentary debates, expert panels, and grassroots citizen assemblies. Despite its ubiquity, the inherent diversity and context dependency of these deliberative processes often results in poorly defined processes that resist standardization, complicating efforts at analysis, transparency, and optimization. This paper advocates for a novel conceptual framework that systematically deconstructs existing deliberation methods into standardized, modular components, thereby facilitating the assembly of measurable deliberative processes that can preserve flexibility and structure. Based on the deficiencies of traditional deliberative approaches exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly within the context of policymaking, as well as the growing potential of emerging technologies—most notably Large Language Models (LLMs)—to substantially enhance the efficacy of deliberation, we introduce the Rapid Think Tank (RTT). The RTT is an innovative approach that harnesses collective intelligence through a streamlined, machine-supported, and transparent methodology. The RTT model is designed to deliver clear, direct outcomes within compressed time frames, addressing the challenges posed by conventional deliberative methods.