Projects - Participatory democracy

Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium (PAIRS)

Paris, France

The first edition of PAIRS took place as an independent side-event of the Paris AI Action Summit (10th - 11th Feb 2025) providing a space to present research and case studies on the state of the art in participatory development and governance of AI, and to build stronger connections across the field.

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Stanford University, Serra Mall, Stanford, CA, USA

Google DeepMind and Stanford researchers built the "Habermas Machine" and found that AI mediators generated more palatable summary statements of the discussions, as rated by participants, than human-written summaries, while still representing minority views in the final version.

Google

Softening Online Extremes Using Network Engineering

Online Technology as a Pathway for Citizen Deliberation and Depolarization

This article proposes, and presents results from, an online technology platform and a methodology, which can help depolarize sectors of society, with the specific application to the current divisive post-war landscape within Colombia.

Dembrane

Netherlands (Nederland, Holland)

Let participants record conversations, we transcribe and help you analyse it in minutes..

AI tools for Decidim

Barcelona, Spain

Work in progress AI integration for the participation platform that allows platform admins to install and configure a spam detection service so that any suspicious content gets reported at the earliest possible step.

Decidim

Active Citizen

Reykjavík, Iceland

Active Citizen is an open source library, API and UI using various AI technologies aimed at empowering citizens democratically.

Your Priorities

Leveraging AI for Democracy: Civic Innovation on the New Digital Playing Field

1025 F Street NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20004

3 essays by Beth Kerley, Carl Miller, and Fernanda Campagnucci outline possible paths toward a prodemocratic vision for AI

reports

Empurrando Juntas

São Paulo

Free tool to gather opinions and simplify participation.

deliberAIde

Berlin

We are developing an end-to-end platform for in-person, online and hybrid deliberative participation processes, starting with: AI-assistance for defining the process; anonymously transcribing and documenting deliberations; summarization and in-depth analysis; and final reporting.

Bpart

Flanders

Jouw Platform Voor Online Participatie

Communiti Labs

Melbourne VIC, Australia

Communiti Labs’ AI-powered data analytics allow project teams to collate insights across all channels and convert them into actionable strategies.

Artificial Intelligence: Its potential and ethics in the practice of public participation

Canada

This research brief explores how public participation practitioners might encounter AI tools; examines the risks, opportunities and uncertainties these tools present; and offers ethical considerations to guide their use.

Converlens

Melbourne VIC, Australia

Discover the modern engagement platform powered by natural language AI to help you gather feedback, manage your data and understand what is being said.

Parla

Platz der Luftbrücke 4-6, 12101, Berlin, Germany

Parla has access to more than 11,000 publicly available documents that have been published on the parliamentary documentation system PARDOK in the current legislative period.

U.S. Public Assembly on High Risk Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Syracuse, NY

The AI Assembly is the first national deliberative event on AI in the United States and represents a significant step toward understanding public sentiment on AI-related issues and shaping the conversation around the role of AI systems in society, with a focus on transparency, accountability, and responsible use.

AI • Objectives • Institute

San Francisco

The AI Objectives Institute (AOI) is a non-profit research lab working to ensure that both AI and future economic systems are built and deployed with genuine human objectives at their core, enabled by broad public input and scalable cooperation.

Speakeasy.ai

Speakeasy AI is a SaaS company building end-to-end tools for better conversations.

Artificial Intelligence for the Legislative Branch

Washington, DC

POPVOX Foundation is working with Demand Progress and the Foundation for American Innovation (formerly the Lincoln Network) to facilitate information-sharing and best practices for the testing, deployment and oversight of automated technologies including Large Language Models (LLMs) in the legislative branch.

Danes je nov dan

Ljubljana

Ljubljana, Slovenia based civic tech NGO, focusing efforts on (digital) political participation, open data, transparency, and public institutional oversight.

Artificial Intelligence in the City: Building Civic Engagement and Public Trust

A collection of essays edited by Ana Brandusescu and Jess Reia featuring essays from participants of the AI in the City: Building Civic Engagement and Public Trust symposium that took place remotely on February 10, 2022.

city
books

Cortico

Bringing underheard voices to the center of a stronger public dialogue

All Our Ideas

Vegmúli 2, 108 Reykjavik, Iceland

All Our Ideas is an innovative tool that you can use for large-scale online engagements to produce a rank-ordered list of public input.

ChatGPT

Citizen participation and machine learning for a better democracy

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)

The experiment will test whether machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) can effectively cluster similar proposals and recommendations from ‘like minded citizens’ on the Consul digital democracy platform

Insights

24 Raul Wallenberg, Ziv Towers, Tel Aviv

Civic engagement tool, powered by algorithms

Polis

Seattle, WA, United States of America

Polis is a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning.

Polis

Copy, Paste, Legislate

Phoenix, AZ, USA

An investigative series deploying algorithms to detect copy-paste legislation

Polco

Middleton, WI

Polco is a platform designed to increase civic engagement, improve government transparency, and inform municipal governments of constituents’ input which, in turn, will help better guide public policy.

Block Party

New York City

We make local policy information accessible and byte-sized, with a weekly email of your community board’s most recent meeting highlights and transcript data.

Your Priorities

Vegmúli 2, 108 Reykjavik, Iceland

Your Priorities is an eDemocracy web application designed by the non profit Citizens Foundation to help groups speak with one voice.

Your Priorities

Fluicity (Efalia Engage)

4 Rue du Caire, 75002 Paris, France

Fluicity is a community engagement software for public and private entities

Conversation AI

Google, 8th Avenue, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA

Conversation AI is a collaborative research effort exploring ML as a tool for better discussions online.

harassment

Plural Policy (formerly Civic Eagle)

Minnesota

Shape the future of public policy with Plural’s intuitive, AI-powered legislative tracking and stakeholder collaboration tools. Effectively influence US federal and state legislation and say goodbye to clunky legacy software and manual spreadsheets.

Assembl

Paris, France

Massive collective intelligence is the capacity to mobilize communities on a large scale (hundreds and thousands of participants) around key stakes and challenges to co-create new solutions in a short space of time.