Grant Writer — Democratic Information Velocity Observatory

Remote · Flexible hours · Project Hub #8 · Focus: democracy, civic research

Which governments actually answer their citizens electronically — and how fast? NTARI's empirical study of 25 national governments measured it once; the Observatory makes it annual. The Democratic Information Velocity Index (DIVI) scores what governments observably do with telecommunications in public deliberation — channels, response speed, whether citizen input demonstrably enters the record — rather than what experts feel about it. No major democracy index measures this. Year one costs $159,500 and produces a published methodology anyone can reproduce, an open dataset, and an annual report in six languages.

You'll write for democracy and civic-research funders — Knight Foundation's information-and-society portfolio is the strongest fit — plus partnership letters to research centers such as Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab and a data-exchange proposal to International IDEA.

Ideal for a policy or political-science writer who wants a research-index pitch in their portfolio. Remote via NTARI's Slack grant desk, with peer review and final approval before submission.

Read the original papers on Democratic Information Velocity:

https://www.ntari.org/post/ntari-whitepaper-addressing-democratic-information-velocity

https://www.ntari.org/post/the-material-culture-of-democratic-deliberation