  We have created a platform for online deliberation called Deme (which rhymes
with 'team'). Deme is designed to allow groups of people to engage in
collaborative drafting, focused discussion, and decision making using the
Internet. The Deme project has evolved greatly from its beginning in 2003. This
chapter outlines the thinking behind Deme's initial design: our motivations for
creating it, the principles that guided its construction, and its most
important design features. The version of Deme described here was written in
PHP and was deployed in 2004 and used by several groups (including organizers
of the 2005 Online Deliberation Conference). Other papers describe later
developments in the Deme project (see Davies et al. 2005, 2008; Davies and
Mintz 2009).
