Dewey's identification of democracy, intelligence and science

Thinking broadly about energy democracy again, in the context of justifying open-source energy system modeling. How is modeling related to energy democracy? Clearly, some expertise is required to develop, validate and run an energy system model. One aspect of democratization would be to decrease this experitise barrier by developing better interfaces, which would lower the barrier to run more experiments. But the allowed space of experiments will be smaller than the numerous choices that were made in developing the model in the first place.

Neurath’s model of planning may be useful, where experts develop a “space” of possible plans (maybe discrete) and non-experts have input into selection of a plan within this space.