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Next up: Understanding Polis - an online route to consensus, February 2025

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All seminars are online, from 4-5pm UK time. Sign up below to receive the zoom link.

The current online series is looking at the use of Deliberative Technologies in Polarised Contexts (see below) led by IPTN member David Curran (University of Coventry).

February 4th, 2025, 4-5pm UK time

Understanding Polis: an online tool to find consensus

Shannon Y Hong of OpenFuture presents the potential and challenge of Polis.

This seminar on Polis, 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. Shannon Y Hong, who currently works with OpenFuture on an AI alignment assembly, will outline real-life examples of where Polis has been used extensively as a tool to find areas of consensus between groups who have differing objectives. In conversation with David, she will also reflect on the real-world dilemmas of operationalising the ideas which have emerged from online spaces. ​

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Previous seminars in this series


December 3rd, 2024: The next steps of Peace - Polling in divided societies

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.

You can find more on Colin's work at https://peacepolls.etinu.net/

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?