AI and Public Engagement
A small US city experiments with AI to find out what residents want
In Bowling Green, Kentucky, 7,890 residents—10% of the city—used an AI-powered platform, Pol.is, to shape a 25-year city plan. Participants submitted and voted on over 3,900 ideas, with popular ones including better healthcare access, more restaurants, and preserving historic buildings. Additionally, half of the ideas had an agreement rate of almost 80%, and subtopics, such as curriculum in K-12 learning, were more emphasized. The platform’s AI tools helped to surface new areas of agreement among community members while having a human in the loop ensured that the engagement had an understanding of the local context, according to a blog post published by Google’s Jigsaw: https://medium.com/jigsaw/how-one-of-the-fastest-growing-cities-in-kentucky-used-ai-to-plan-for-the-next-25-years-3b70c4fd1412
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How is AI augmenting collective intelligence for the SDGs?
“Most uses of AI in development today are based on machine learning algorithms, which improve their performance based on extracting patterns from very large training datasets. This approach is a great fit for collective intelligence projects, many of which gather or interpret large amounts of human-generated content like images and videos, crowdsourced through smartphone apps and online platforms.” This blog post highlights three ways that AI can augment and scale the intelligence of groups: improving data processing speed and scale, organizing human knowledge through topic clustering, and helping to optimize and prioritize workflows.
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AI for collective intelligence
“AI has emerged as a transformative force in society, reshaping economies, work, and everyday life. We argue that AI can not only improve short-term productivity but can also enhance a group’s collective intelligence. Specifically, AI can be employed to enhance three elements of collective intelligence: collective memory, collective attention, and collective reasoning…In this special issue of ACM Collective Intelligence on ‘AI for Collective Intelligence,’ we explore how this partnership can be harnessed by presenting a collection of diverse articles. The first article is an empirical study highlighting AI’s role in enhancing creativity—a frequently cited benefit of AI—through tools like chatbots and large language models (LLMs). The second article showcases practical applications of how AI can be leveraged to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how AI can help tackle problems that are collective in nature, and to scale community-led deliberation. These discussions aim to reveal how AI, in tandem with human effort, can drive innovative solutions and creative processes that benefit humanity at large.”
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Transforming democracy from within: A Closer Look at Brazil’s Citizen Engagement Initiatives in Parliament - Part 1
“Brazil’s Senate stands as a powerful example of how parliaments can use technology to make citizen engagement in lawmaking more accessible and meaningful. But to truly transform democracy from within, these innovations must be guided by clear ends and an understanding that participation is a limited resource. In this post – the first in a two-part analysis – Pompeu Fabra University professor José Luis Martí identifies four pillars of democratic innovation that may provide crucial guidance in evaluating actual public initiatives, such as those implemented in Brazil: the importance of the ends of participation, the need for an economy of participation, the case for worshipping citizen engagement, and the centrality of deliberation.”
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Transforming democracy from within: A Closer Look at Brazil’s Citizen Engagement Initiatives in Parliament - Part 2
Pompeu Fabra University professor José Luis Martí makes the case for worshipping citizen participation and for giving deliberation the central role it deserves in our democracies today. Martí argues that while transforming our democratic institutions from within is both necessary and urgent, it is not an easy task.
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Designing AI With Communities: the AIEP Project
Together with hundreds of families, the Burnes Center for Social Change and Innovate Public Schools are co-designing an AI-powered tool designed to empower families to better understand and engage with their child’s individualized education plan (IEP). This free, open-source platform aims to eliminate key barriers families face when engaging with IEPs, which are often lengthy and packed with specialized educational jargon, making them challenging to understand. By integrating community perspectives into the heart of the platform's technological design, the project aims to ensure that the AI tool reflects and serves the needs, values, and aspirations of the people who will use it.
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