Volunteer Position

Volunteer Lead — Digital Deliberation & Data

Organization: Save Our Slopes / Land Lovers Network
Type: Volunteer Lead, with potential for paid contract work as funding develops
Term: Initial 3- to 6-month incubation period
Location: Alberta-based preferred; remote within Alberta welcome
Commitment: Approximately 3–5 hours per week
Compensation: Volunteer initially, with potential to transition into paid project work

About Save Our Slopes & Land Lovers Network

Save Our Slopes and Land Lovers Network are developing a new approach to public engagement around water and the future of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.

Save Our Slopes is an active visual storytelling and public-awareness platform helping Albertans understand the Eastern Slopes—the headwaters, forests, ecosystems and communities that depend upon them. Our emerging strategy connects issues that are often treated separately, including water, forestry, coal, wildfire, wildlife, recreation, restoration and public decision-making.

Land Lovers Network works more directly through relationships, community gatherings, partnerships and watershed assemblies. Together, we are exploring how storytelling, digital participation and face-to-face conversations can help build a more meaningful public constituency around water.

Rather than simply asking people to sign petitions or agree with predetermined positions, we want to experiment with ways for Albertans to encounter different perspectives, identify disagreements and discover areas of common ground.

Position summary

We are seeking a curious, thoughtful and self-directed Volunteer Lead — Digital Deliberation & Data to help us build and test this capacity over the next 3 to 6 months.

A central part of the project will be experimenting with Pol.is, an open-source deliberative technology that allows participants to respond to propositions, submit their own statements and see how perspectives cluster across a larger conversation.

Our goal is to connect public storytelling with participation. Save Our Slopes videos and other content will invite people to “Have Your Say” through online deliberations. Those conversations can then inform community gatherings and watershed assemblies, with what we learn feeding back into subsequent questions, stories and public conversations.

The emerging engagement cycle is:

Story → Question → Online participation → Results → Public conversation → Deeper question → New story

This role will help us design the digital and data infrastructure that makes that cycle possible.

Core responsibilities

The Digital Deliberation & Data Lead will help:

• Set up, test and manage digital deliberations using Pol.is and potentially other open-source civic technology.
• Work with the project team to develop fair, accessible and understandable questions and propositions.
• Help ensure deliberations include meaningful differences in perspective rather than being structured to produce predetermined outcomes.
• Monitor participation, response patterns and data quality.
• Analyze areas of agreement, disagreement, clustering and emerging common ground.
• Develop transparent and accessible approaches for communicating deliberation results publicly.
• Help integrate deliberative surveys into Save Our Slopes and project websites, social campaigns and email pathways.
• Work with communications and organizing team members to connect online participation with in-person conversations and watershed assemblies.
• Help develop privacy, consent, transparency and data-governance practices.
• Explore additional open-source civic technology and participatory-democracy tools that could strengthen the initiative.
• Help establish measurement systems for participation, repeat participation, geographic reach and other engagement indicators.
• Document what works and what does not so the initial experiment can inform future phases of the project.

Preferred qualifications

We are open to candidates from a wide range of professional, academic and technical backgrounds.

Relevant experience or interests could include:

• Digital democracy or civic technology
• Deliberative democracy and public participation
• Data science, statistics or quantitative research
• Survey design or public-opinion research
• Political science, sociology or public policy
• Community engagement and facilitation
• Software or web development
• Data visualization and analysis
• Research methods
• Open-source technology

Technical experience is useful but not essential. We are particularly interested in someone who is intellectually curious, comfortable working with data, willing to learn new technology and committed to administering a public participation process fairly.

Experience with Pol.is is an asset but not required.

Ideal candidate profile

The ideal person is interested not simply in collecting survey responses, but in exploring a larger question:

How can technology help people with different perspectives discover where common ground exists?

They should be comfortable with complexity and disagreement and interested in learning what participants actually think rather than trying to manufacture consensus.

They will have good judgment around neutrality, transparency, privacy and responsible use of participant data. They should also enjoy experimenting and building systems in an early-stage environment where not everything has been figured out yet.

This role would be particularly well suited to a graduate student, researcher, civic technologist, data analyst, developer or public-engagement practitioner interested in applying their skills to a real-world deliberative-democracy experiment.

Early deliverables during the first 6 to 8 weeks

Working with the project team, early priorities could include:

• Learn, test and document the Pol.is platform and workflow.
• Help design and launch an initial pilot deliberation.
• Develop an initial framework for writing and reviewing propositions.
• Establish basic participation, privacy, consent and transparency protocols.
• Help design the website pathway from social content → “Have Your Say” → Pol.is participation → results → ongoing involvement.
• Establish an initial framework for analyzing and communicating results.
• Identify useful participation and data-quality metrics.
• Develop a simple internal dashboard or reporting process.
• Recommend additional civic-tech tools or integrations worth exploring.
• Help evaluate the pilot and recommend improvements before broader public promotion.

Reporting and collaboration

This role will work closely with the Project Lead and collaborate with the communications, editorial, events and partnerships team.

The first few months are intentionally experimental. September and October 2026 are focused on building and testing the participation infrastructure, with a broader public storytelling and recruitment campaign anticipated to begin in November and community conversations and watershed assemblies expanding through the winter.

We are looking for someone who wants to help shape the approach, not simply administer a finished system.

Commitment and opportunity

We anticipate approximately 3–5 hours per week for an initial 3- to 6-month commitment.

The position is initially volunteer-based. As the initiative develops and additional funding is secured, there may be opportunities for this role—or specific technical and analytical components of it—to transition into paid contract work.

Why this matters

We are interested in testing a simple idea:

What could happen if thousands of Albertans weren’t just asked what they oppose—but were given meaningful ways to discover what they agree upon?

Water provides an unusual opportunity to test that question. Different communities, industries and perspectives may disagree about how Alberta’s landscapes should be managed, but everyone ultimately depends upon functioning watersheds.

We want to explore whether digital deliberation, public storytelling and community conversations can work together to build a different kind of civic infrastructure around the waters we share.

To apply

Please send to codeblue@bowbioregion.ca :

• A short note explaining your interest.
• A resume or summary of relevant experience.
• Any examples of relevant research, data analysis, civic technology, public-engagement or software projects, if available.

In your note, please also tell us:

• What interests you about digital deliberation or participatory democracy?
• What experience do you have working with data, surveys, technology or public engagement?
• What do you think makes an online public-participation process credible and trustworthy?
• Are you comfortable committing approximately 3–5 hours per week for an initial 3–6 month period?

Experience with Pol.is is not required. Curiosity, good judgment and an interest in helping people find common ground are more important.

Watch this YouTube video for background on where this project has emerged from: https://youtu.be/aXgne-9F7uU

Please mention you saw this at GoodWork.ca.