New Technologies for deliberation

Abstract

In the past twenty years we have observed the emergence of many pilots of digital platforms to support citizens’ participation. The vast majority of platforms were designed to support a specific democratic innovation (participatory budgeting, citizens assemblies, participatory monitoring, citizens’ consultations etc.). Great successes have been achieved in generating large numbers of participants in ideation, voting, and monitoring activities with some pilots involving hundreds of thousands of people. So far however the existing technology has not yet been able to support large scale deliberation, intended as a good quality discussion and exchange of arguments, and the same scale limitations that we find in face-to-face deliberation are found in the online counterparts. So far also there is a consensus that the quality of in person processes cannot be replicated in online ones and that online processes often are used as a short-cut to cut costs instead as a way to promote the further democratization of democratic innovations. The best-practice deliberation platforms at the moment are based on small group video discussion formats that translates to a video-conference the offline design of minipublics. Hybrid best practices of participatory budgeting leverage in person meetings to conduct argumentation, while use technology for voting and ideation. Does the potential of digital technology to go beyond these formats exist? Or is the problem not in the machine but in our own ability to deliberate? Where exactly do limits lie? Can we use machines to better summarize and transmit information across small groups? Can we scale-up at least some part of deliberation via online technologies? Can we use artificial intelligence to overcome some of the logistical complexities of scaling-up deliberation? This panel is seeking to explore these questions by focusing on recent approaches that have focused on leveraging argument mapping technology, argument visualization technology, recommendation algorithms, artificial moderation, automatic translation and hybrid solutions mixing online and offline approaches to attempt to scale up deliberation. Contributions can be theoretical or empirical, the latter can be in the form of cases studies, comparative analysis of the performance of different platforms or proposals for specific adaptation of existing technologies that have not yet been used by democratic innovations. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary contributions that combine web-science, computer-science, data-science, communication studies, psychology and political science.

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