AI-Augmented Public Deliberation

Project Title: Framework for AI-Augmented Participatory Democracy through Public Deliberation

Deliberative democracy addresses the continued decline of trust in institutions like the media, government, and non-governmental organizations by increasing active citizen engagement through various avenues, such as citizen assemblies, minipublics, and other forums of civic participation. Technological advances through online deliberation platforms, such as pol.is and Stanford Deliberate have reduced barriers to participation and have seen success in scaling it to a wider population. 

Unfortunately, the scope of online deliberation has been limited to being aggregators of opinions (what policy to implement), while the problem of translating these outputs into policy implementations (how to implement) is separated into the technocratic realm of policy analysis. This limits the citizen's scope of participation in governance and rulemaking, since there is a perceived gap of expertise between the deliberating public and the expertise required for technocratic policy analysis, thereby widening the political agency gap. 

The goal of this project is to use recent advances in computational methods such as Game-theoretic Simulations and Large Language Models to design, develop, and evaluate an AI-augmented participatory governance platform with three interrelated objectives:  

1. To strengthen consensus by improving deliberation quality and rhetoric through AI-augmented moderation.  
2. To strengthen policymaking by translating citizen deliberation output into structured formats for policy analysis and identifying trade-offs and actionable options to deliberators and policymakers.  
3. To strengthen civic participation by assisting citizens to deliberate directly on policy implementation and governance rules, not just policy goals, ensuring their perspectives are meaningfully integrated into policy. 

The project envisions AI as public-interest-technology and will provide municipalities and civic organizations with a scalable, transparent, and inclusive model for public consultation. Policymakers can ensure that citizen contributions are easier to interpret, directly actionable, and aligned with institutional constraints.