Deliberix — User guide

Getting started

Deliberix is a deliberative survey platform. Participants vote on short statements (agree / disagree / skip), mark the ones that matter most as important, and can submit new statements for others to vote on.

To create an account, tap Register on the login screen, enter your name, email, and password, and you are taken straight to your surveys list. To sign in to an existing account, tap Sign in and enter your email and password.

In surveys that have the Allow anonymous voting setting enabled, you can participate without an account — just open the survey link or scan the QR code and you will be joined automatically as an anonymous participant. No registration is required in that case.

Language and theme can be changed any time from the Settings page (tap the profile icon or open the side menu).

On this platform you can sign in with an external account using the buttons on the login and registration screens — you don't have to create a separate password here. Choose a provider, approve the sign-in on its own secure page, and you'll be brought back here already signed in.

The first time you use a provider, an account is created for you automatically. If you already have an account with the same email address, and the provider has confirmed that email is yours, the two are linked so you always land in the same account. If an account with your email already exists but the provider hasn't confirmed the address, sign in with your email and password instead.

Available sign-in options:

Google — sign in with any Google account.
Microsoft — sign in with a personal Microsoft account or a work or school (organization) account.

Creating a survey

To create a survey, open Surveys and tap the + button, or pick Create survey from the side menu. Enter a title and a short description; these are the only required fields. Everything else — visibility, privacy, statement order, closing date, and more — lives under Advanced settings and can be left at defaults for now.

After saving, you land on the Seed statements tab where you can add the initial statements that participants will vote on. When you are happy with the setup, tap Activate on the Overview tab to open the survey for voting.

Seed statements are optional. A survey can be activated without any — the first approved statement (submitted by you or by a participant) is enough to start voting.

While the survey is still a draft, the Overview tab shows a short readiness summary (how many statements are ready and whether an intake form is set) and a Preview as participant button. The preview walks you through the intake form and the voting screens exactly as a participant would see them, without saving anything.

The title and description can be changed at any time in the Settings tab, even after the survey is activated or closed. The survey's link stays the same. The other settings can be adjusted while the survey is a draft; once it starts collecting statements or opens for voting, they are shown read-only.

Visibility

The Visibility setting controls who can discover your survey.

Public — the survey appears in the public discovery list. Anyone signed in can browse to it and join. Use this for open community discussions or research where you want maximum reach.
Private — the survey is not listed anywhere. It is still fully accessible to anyone who has the direct link or QR code — it just won't be promoted or discoverable by browsing.

Note that visibility is purely about discovery. Access (whether a visitor needs an account to participate) is controlled separately by the Allow anonymous voting setting.

Privacy mode

Controls how participant identity is recorded during voting.

Anonymous — strict anonymity for every participant. Even signed-in users are joined via the anonymous path, so no database link exists between their votes and their account. Participant names are hidden from everyone, including the admin.
Public — every participant is identified. Names are visible to other participants when browsing results.
Participant's choice — each participant picks their anonymity level at join time. Signed-in users see two buttons on the join screen and can choose to join identified or anonymously. Visitors who join without an account (when Allow anonymous voting is enabled) are always anonymous by default — they have no identity to choose from.

Note that this setting only affects how identities are recorded and displayed. Survey discovery (who can find the survey) is a separate Visibility setting.

Result visibility

When participants can see the aggregated results.

After completion — a participant can only see results once they have voted on all available statements. This avoids social-proof bias where early results influence later votes.
Continuous — results are visible at any time during the survey. Useful for live sessions or when real-time trends are useful.
After close — results become visible only after the survey is officially closed. Keeps all responses independent until the survey ends.

Admins can always see results regardless of this setting.

Statement order

The order in which statements are shown to each participant during voting.

Random — a different random order for every participant. This reduces order bias, so no single statement gets systematically more or fewer votes because of its position.
Sequential — statements appear in the fixed order you defined. Use this when the sequence of questions matters or when you want a guided narrative flow.
Least voted first — statements with the fewest total responses come first. This ensures that all statements receive roughly equal coverage, even in surveys where many participants stop before reaching the end.

Statement length

Minimum and maximum number of characters allowed for participant-submitted statements. This only applies to statements that participants write and submit themselves; seed statements added by the admin are not subject to these limits. Setting a minimum prevents very short, low-quality submissions; setting a maximum keeps the statements concise and comparable.

Closes at

An optional closing date and time for the survey. The time is in server time (UTC). After this moment, no further voting is accepted and no new statements can be submitted. The survey and its results remain visible; closing only blocks new responses. Leave the field empty if the survey should stay open indefinitely.

Moderation

Controls whether participant-submitted statements must be approved before becoming visible to other voters.

When moderation is enabled, every statement submitted by a participant goes into the Moderation tab queue. An admin or moderator can then Approve or Reject each one. Approved statements immediately enter the voting pool. Rejected statements are hidden from participants but are not permanently deleted from the server — admins can still see them in the queue.

This setting locks once the survey is activated and cannot be changed afterwards.

Status filter

The queue defaults to showing all statements regardless of status. Use the filter at the top to narrow the view to Pending, Approved, or Rejected statements only.

Editing statements

Admins and moderators can edit any statement at any time using the Edit action on each row. On the first edit the original text is preserved automatically. Clicking the edited tag next to the status badge opens a dialog that shows the original wording so you can compare it with the current text. Subsequent edits update the current text but do not overwrite the stored original.

If the statement already has votes at the time of editing, the dialog shows how many. Substantive rewrites should be considered carefully because votes were cast on the original phrasing.

Rejected statements

Rejected statements remain visible in the moderation queue — they are no longer removed from the list. This makes it easy to review past decisions and reconsider them if needed.

Allow anonymous voting

If enabled, anyone with the survey link or QR code can join and vote without creating an account. This setting controls access, not anonymity — it determines whether link-visitors without an account are allowed in at all.

When a visitor without an account opens the link, they are automatically joined as an anonymous participant and an identity is stored in a browser cookie. As long as the same cookie is present, Deliberix recognises them as the same person across sessions. If the cookie is cleared, the anonymous participant cannot recover their previous session.

This setting is independent of Privacy mode. For example, you can allow anonymous access while the survey uses Public privacy mode — visitors join without accounts but are still recorded as anonymous (there is no identity to make public).

To share the survey with anonymous participants, go to the Share tab on the survey management screen — it shows both the direct link and a scannable QR code.

Anonymous participants count toward response statistics just like registered users. However, they cannot be assigned the Moderator role; only registered participants can be promoted to moderator.

This setting locks once the survey is activated and cannot be changed afterwards.

Intake form

An optional set of questions that participants answer before they start voting. Intake questions are useful for capturing demographics, professional role, region, or any other attribute you want to cross-reference with voting data.

Required vs optional

Each field has a Required toggle. A required field blocks joining until it's answered: a Text field counts as answered once it holds more than whitespace; Checkboxes and a multi-select Dropdown / Searchable select count as answered once at least one option is selected. Leaving one or more required fields empty blocks joining and shows a message naming the missing fields. Optional fields can be left blank.

A required field that's currently hidden by a conditional logic rule (see below) is never counted as missing — visibility is checked first, so marking a field required only enforces it while the field is actually shown to the participant. This is what makes Required and Conditional logic safe to combine.

Field types

The following field types are available:

Text — free-form single-line answer.
Dropdown — participant picks one option from a fixed list; all options are shown at once.
Dropdown / Searchable select — a compact field the participant clicks and then types into to filter, instead of scanning a long list of visible choices. Prefer this over the plain Dropdown or Radio buttons whenever the option list is long — a country picker (~195 options), a 1–100 scale, or a list of 25–50 consortium partners. Supports single or multiple selection via the Allow multiple selections toggle.
Radio buttons — same as dropdown but options are always visible.
Checkboxes — participant can select multiple options.
Section heading — not an input; inserts an emphasized heading with a separator line to visually group the fields that follow it (e.g. "Affiliation", "Work packages"). Add one with Add section heading in the builder.

For a Dropdown, Dropdown / Searchable select, Radio buttons, or Checkboxes field, use Bulk edit options to paste the whole option list at once instead of adding options one by one. Each line is either value|Label|Label — an explicit value followed by one label per configured language, in the brand's language order (for this site, Czech first: us|Spojené státy|United States) — or a bare label on its own (United States), whose value is generated automatically. A line can end with one more column holding an info link (see below): ai|Akt o AI|EU AI Act|https://example.org/ai-act, or ai|EU AI Act|https://example.org/ai-act on a site configured for a single language. The link column is positional — it comes after one label per configured language — so a line must spell out every label to carry one; leaving it off means that option has no link. The bulk editor states the exact line format for this site above the text box.

Info links on options

Any option of a Dropdown, Dropdown / Searchable select, Radio buttons, or Checkboxes field can carry an Info link — an optional web address pointing at background reading for that particular choice. Participants see a small ⓘ next to the option; clicking it opens the page in a new tab and does not select, deselect, or otherwise change their answer. An option with no info link shows no icon, so the form stays clean.

Use it when an option names something a participant may not know well enough to answer honestly — a regulation, a programme, a technical term:

Topic: EU AI Act / AI governance ⓘ

The address must be a full one starting with http:// or https:// (for example https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj). The builder flags anything else while you type and the survey won't save until it's fixed. One link per option, shared by all languages — point it at the page most of your participants can read, or at a page that offers its own language switch.

For the plain Dropdown, the options live inside the browser's own dropdown overlay, where an icon can't be placed. That field gets a single ⓘ to the right of it instead — the same slot the help icons sit in — which opens a short panel listing every option that has a link, reachable before choosing. All other field types show the ⓘ inline next to the option itself.

Each field has a unique ID (used internally) and bilingual labels (currently Czech and English). The bilingual-label requirement is transitional; it will be replaced by per-instance language configuration in a future release.

Conditional logic

Any field except a Section heading can be shown only when another field holds a particular value. Toggle Conditional logic on the field you want to hide, then set:

Show when field — the source field, picked by its Field ID. Only fields that have an ID and aren't a Section heading are offered — headings hold no value, so they can never be a source, and they can't carry a condition themselves either.
equals value — type the source field's option Value (the one shown in that option's own Value box in the builder, not its label). The match is exact and case-sensitive, and equality is the only operator available — there is no "not equals", "contains", or way to combine several conditions with AND/OR.

If the source field allows more than one selection (Checkboxes, or a Dropdown / Searchable select with Allow multiple selections on), the condition matches as soon as the target value is among the ones selected, not only when it's the sole selection.

A field can carry only one condition. To hide a whole group of fields together, add the same condition to each field in the group — a Section heading can't be conditioned itself, so the heading stays visible even when everything below it is hidden.

Because the match is exact, a Text field makes a poor condition source — a stray character breaks the match silently. Prefer a Dropdown, Radio buttons, or Checkboxes field, whose option values you control.

Preview renders the form live with the same visibility rules a participant gets, so you can fill in the source field there and confirm the branching works before activating the survey.

Example. Members of a ~30-partner research consortium join a survey alongside outside participants. The intake form has an Affiliation field (Dropdown / Searchable select: one option per partner, plus "Other") and a Work packages field (Checkboxes) that should appear only for actual partners. A single condition can only test for one exact value, so "Affiliation is any partner except Other" can't be expressed directly on Affiliation itself. Splitting the question in two solves it: a Consortium member? field (Radio buttons: Yes / No) plus a Which partner field (Dropdown / Searchable select) conditioned on Consortium member? equals yes, and Work packages conditioned on the same rule. Outside participants see none of the three, and the "Other" option never has to be removed.

Managing a survey

After creating a survey, the management screen gives you several tabs:

Overview — shows the survey title, description, and a shortcut to open the voting screen.
Seed statements — add, review, and remove the initial statements before (and after) activation.
Start collecting / Open voting / Close — move the survey through its lifecycle. Start collecting opens it for submissions but keeps voting locked; Open voting unlocks voting; Close stops new responses. See Collecting statements before voting. All actions ask for confirmation.
Participants — see everyone who has joined, assign or remove the Moderator role using the role dropdown next to each participant, and remove participants if needed.
Moderation — the approval queue for participant-submitted statements. Appears only when moderation is enabled.
Share — the Share button in the survey toolbar opens a panel with the direct link and a QR code. The QR code can also be expanded to fullscreen, which is convenient for displaying on a projector or shared screen.
Settings — edit the title and description (at any time) and adjust configuration options (while the survey is a draft; afterwards they are shown read-only).
Delete survey — permanently removes the survey and all its data. This action cannot be undone. If you administer other surveys, the dialog lets you forward the deleted survey's link to one of them, so anyone who already has the link (for example from an invitation e-mail) lands there instead of on a dead page. A survey with the same title — usually the copy made to replace it — is pre-selected; choose Nowhere to let the link stop working.

Collecting statements before voting

Sometimes you want participants to submit statements first — for example during a meeting — and only open voting afterwards, possibly the next day. The optional "collecting" phase makes this explicit.

From the survey settings, a survey in Draft can move to one of two states:

Start collecting — opens the survey to participants. They can join, submit statements, and see other approved statements. Voting is locked.
Open voting — skips the collecting phase entirely. Use this if you don't need a separate collection step.

While the survey is in Collecting, participant-submitted statements follow the same moderation rules as during voting: if moderation is on, statements wait for admin approval before showing up in the stream.

Opening voting

When you're ready to let participants vote, click Open voting on the survey settings tab. The statement list isn't "frozen" in a strict sense — participants can still submit new statements while voting runs (subject to moderation), exactly like before this feature existed.

Once voting is open, the survey can no longer return to the collecting phase. Your next move is Close survey when voting is done.

Voting

The voting screen shows one statement at a time. For each statement you have three response buttons:

Agree — you support or accept the statement.
Disagree — you oppose or reject the statement.
Skip — you have no opinion or prefer not to take a position. Skipped statements are recorded and shown in the results.

Below the response buttons is the Important toggle. Tap it to flag a statement as particularly significant to you, regardless of how you voted. Importance is tallied separately and shown in the results.

A progress bar at the top shows how many statements remain. After voting on all available statements, the submit-statement form appears in place of the voting card — you can propose your own statement without navigating back to the overview first. If new statements are added or approved later, you can return and vote on them.

To suggest a new statement at any point, tap Submit a statement at the bottom of the voting screen. Enter your text and submit. If moderation is on, an admin reviews it before it appears for others.

Results

The results screen shows every statement with a breakdown of responses as horizontal bars: green for agree, red for disagree, grey for skip, and yellow for important. Each bar shows the percentage share for that response category.

Use the Sort by control to reorder statements:

Total votes — most-voted statements first, useful for seeing what was most discussed.
Agreement — highest agreement share first, surfaces the most widely accepted statements.
Importance — highest importance share first, shows what participants care about most regardless of their agree/disagree position.

What participants can see on the results screen depends on the survey's Result visibility setting. Admins always have full access to results, including while the survey is still active and before any voting thresholds are reached.

Roles

Admin — full control: can edit settings, activate or close the survey, manage seed statements, moderate submissions, and manage participants. The survey's creator is the Owner — always an admin, and the only one who can add or remove other admins.
Moderator — a participant promoted by an admin. Can approve or reject participant-submitted statements in the Moderation tab, but cannot change survey settings or manage other participants.
Participant — a regular member who can vote, toggle importance, and optionally submit new statements.

To assign the Moderator role, go to the Participants tab on the management screen, find the participant, and use the role dropdown next to their name. Only registered (non-anonymous) participants can be promoted to Moderator.

Co-admins. From the Participants tab the Owner can make any registered participant an admin by setting their role to Admin (and can demote them the same way). Co-admins share every admin power except adding or removing other admins, which stays with the Owner.

Export and import

An admin can export a survey's design to a file, and import it to recreate the survey elsewhere. Export and import cover the design only — settings, the intake form, and statements — never votes, results, or participants.

Export. On the survey's management screen, open Export (next to Share). Choose whether to include approved participant statements (off by default — only your seed statements are exported), then download one of three formats:

JSON — the complete design in a machine-readable file. This is the file you re-import.
HTML — a printable, human-readable snapshot of the survey design.
CSV — a spreadsheet of the statements (text and type).

Import. On the survey list, use Import and pick a JSON file exported from Deliberix. This creates a new draft survey that you own, with the exported settings, intake form, and statements copied in. It never overwrites an existing survey, and the new survey starts as a draft so you can review it before activating. Importing a survey whose visibility is Community requires you to be an approved community member.

FAQ

Can I edit a statement after submitting it? No. Once a statement is submitted, it cannot be edited. If you made a mistake or want to rephrase, submit a new statement with the corrected text.

Why can't I see the results yet? Results are gated by the Result visibility setting chosen by the admin. If it is set to After completion, you need to vote on all currently available statements first. If it is set to After close, results are only shown once the survey is officially closed. Check the survey settings or ask the admin which option is in use.

How do I leave a survey I joined? There is no self-service leave option at the moment. Ask the survey admin to remove you from the Participants tab on the management screen.