This next event is the last in the current series looking at the use of Deliberative Technologies in Polarised Contexts (see below), and led by IPTN member David Curran (University of Coventry). All seminars are online, from 4-5pm UK time. Sign up below to receive the zoom link.
March 4th 2025, 4-5pm UK time
Protracted Divides: building bridges in virtual spaces
Join us online for the last seminar in this series - a discussion on applying the tech in our own contexts. We will be looking back at the last two talks from Colin Irwin and Shannon Y Hong (see below) to develop some of the important points that they raised. These include digital literacy for peacebuilders; the knotty question of process design; and the implications for how these tech tools can be employed to their best effect in longterm peacebuilding work. This session will be recorded, and be used as the base for a co-authored article on human to tech interaction in the peacebuilding world.
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Previous seminars in this series
The next steps of Peace - Polling in divided societies (December 2024)
Colin Irwin, an expert on public opinion, public diplomacy and peace processes talks about his 20 years of experience of leading national polls in post-conflict countries. Most recently, he has worked alongside the UN and the organisation Remesh - which describes itself as the AI-powered insights platform - to develop highly sophisticated polling to bridge divides in post-conflict contexts. Colin reflects on this collaboration, and explore the potential of collaborating with tech specialists in the process of building and institutionalising peace.
Understanding Polis: an online tool to find consensus (February 2025)
Shannon Y Hong of OpenFuture presented on the potential and challenge of Polis, a virtual tool for peacebuilding. Shannon's great talk shared six case studies of how and where Polis is being used to develop dialogue in situations ranging from the domestic (Uber, community building) to international settings. Related links:
- 1. Paper on vTaiwan: An Empirical Study of Open Consultation Process in Taiwan
- 2. Audrey Tang’s talk on the Uber and Airbnb Deliberations
- 3. Paper on the Klimarat: Creating an online conversation between a nation and a mini-public: a case study on Polis & the Austrian Citizens’ Climate Council
- 4. Bowling Green Report
- 5. Anthropic Report.
Deliberative Technologies in Polarised Contexts
Deliberative technologies offer digital tools for supporting public discussion on policy issues, emphasizing citizen participation and collective intelligence. They enable people to listen at scale to each other, add their policy ideas, incentivize finding common ground across polarized publics, and enable synthesizing and ranking on ideas with wide consensus.
The seminars draw on outputs from a workshop held in the US in June 2024, which brought together peacebuilding and governance practitioners, deliberative technology and democracy experts and tech designers from the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the US. The workshop was led by leading peacetech scholar and activist Professor Lisa Schirch and took place at the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame, supported by the Toda Peace Institute. At the Toda Peace Institute and University of Notre Dame, research on deliberative technologies has been looking at:
Instrumental Policy Impact: Do deliberative technologies bring decision making closer to the concerns of citizens? Under what conditions will government policymakers respond to public consensus identified in this way?
Intrinsic Value of Civic Agency: Giving people a voice on fundamental integral human development processes (such as poverty mitigation, health or education inequity) restores the dignity of the persons affected by these challenges. How can deliberative technologies contribute to civic agency?
Socio-technical Processes and Responsible AI: Are deliberative technologies aligned with responsible AI practices in terms of fairness, robustness, transparency, privacy, and safety? What are the ethical frameworks and decision points are considered?
Evolution of Democratic Innovations: What are the opportunities and obstacles to foster a more systematic approach to citizen deliberation and inclusion in political and policymaking processes using deliberative technologies?
Comparative Research: What are the comparative characteristics, designs, benefits, and drawbacks of different deliberative technologies?
Contextual Research: What considerations go into choosing which type of deliberative technology to deploy in a given context? Do different deliberative technologies work better or worse on different types of problems or in different political and cultural contexts?