The cutting edge of digital democracy

At CII we’ve been interested in digital democracy for a number of years and that interest has focused primarily on the Polis (pol.is) platform because of its ability to enable large-scale deliberation, mapping of opinions, identifying areas of consensus, and understand diverse perspectives through a holistic visualization and clustering approach. If you’re not familiar with Polis here’s a simple explanation of how it works.

The celebrated use case of regulating Uber in Taiwan nearly a decade ago served as a great inspiration. Polis offered a glimpse of what tech enabled collective wisdom at scale might look like.

I personally have used Polis many times to run broad community engagements that are used to inform Citizens Assemblies and Juries (minipublics or microcosms) on public sentiment and provide new ideas, possible areas of consensus and opinion mapping. Each time Polis has brought real gifts of insight as well as having its limitations. For example not everyone ‘gets’ what they are doing when commenting and voting and its reports need quite a lot of explaining to people who are new to the platform.

In the last couple of years, the tech landscape has evolved significantly with advances in artificial intelligence(AI) and large language models (LLM). Parallel to these advances new digital democracy platforms designed to facilitate large-scale, inclusive, and impactful discussions have emerged. These tools—many of which incorporate AI and LLMs to assist with data synthesis, and sensemaking look like they are poised to surpass what Polis has offered.

I say look like because I’ve only dipped my toes into some of the new platforms, testing demos and exploring features. I have yet to immerse myself using them with larger groups, where you really get to understand their pros and cons.

I’ll give a very brief overview of the following platforms: Harmonica, Cortico’s Fora, Talk to the City, Suffrago, CommonGoodAI plus a couple of prototypes of upgrades on Polis. If anyone has more experience using any of these platforms please do share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Harmonica: accelerating group sense-making with AI

Harmonica is a newly released, open-source, AI-powered tool designed to make asynchronous group discussions easy, organized, and productive. Its aim is to support group sense-making, saving time and fostering collaboration without needing long meetings or endless email chains.

Here’s how it works:

First, a host sets up a discussion by logging into Harmonica and picking a template for the topic—whether it’s brainstorming ideas, solving a problem, or gathering feedback. Once the session is ready, the host shares a link with the group, who can join through familiar messaging apps. Participants chat one-on-one with Harmonica’s AI assistant, which asks questions and collects responses. As the input comes in, AI finds common themes, and highlights unique ideas or areas of agreement. Once the discussion is over, the host receives a clear, actionable report summarizing the group’s insights and suggestions.

Cortico's Fora: fostering understanding across divides

Cortico’s Fora is an innovative platform designed to create spaces for trustworthy, in-person public discourse by leveraging technology and human-centric design. The aim is to counter growing polarization and social fragmentation fueled by traditional social media dynamics. It prioritizes authentic human connection and trust-building, and relies on human facilitators to guide small-group conversations in structured environments, ensuring that each participant feels heard and respected.

The process seeks to elicit deeper empathy among groups that might otherwise remain disconnected by focusing on authentic personal stories rather than opinions. Consent based audio recordings of group discussions are analyzed by AI which identifies patterns across conversations, helping communities and decision-makers see connections and themes.

Here’s some audio of participants reflecting on their experience of Fora.

Talk to the City: making sense of participation at scale

Developed by the AI Objectives Institute (AOI) whose mission is "guiding AI to defend and enhance human agency”, Talk to the City (T3C) is an open-source platform that scales democratic engagement using AI and summarizes input to support sensemaking. Input methods can be diverse, e.g recorded video conversations, interactions with chat bots, social media discussions or even Polis conversations.

T3C works well with large datasets and it can represent data by clustering opinions, and generates interactive reports that identify the main themes of discussion and the individual inputs that formed those themes. To give you a sense of how it summarizes large scale conversations, here's a use case from recorded breakout-group discussions at the 2024 workshop on Deliberative Technology in Polarized Contexts at Notre Dame University.

Suffrago: making representative democracy wiser and more participatory

Suffrago is a newly launched UK-based platform designed to enhance representative democracy by fostering meaningful civic participation. It connects users to their local representatives, enabling them to submit statements on any topic of concern. Using its advanced algorithm, the platform analyzes these statements for sentiment, emotion, and key themes, clustering and aggregating inputs to create clear survey questions that everyone can vote on. The results are standardized, digestible, and fully transparent to everyone, ensuring they can be effectively communicated whilst making public sentiment actionable for policymakers. By transforming raw input into structured insights, Suffrago promotes consensus and empowers communities, providing a constructive alternative to divisive social media discourse.

Common Good AI: building bridges through collaborative prioritization

Common Good AI is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering inclusive dialogue and collective problem-solving. They currently use a tool called Crowdsmart.ai. This platform gathers diverse ideas on a given question or issue which other participants then prioritize and rank according to what feels most important to them. Results can be consulted at any given moment with a display via an importance vs popularity (most discussed) report graph with most important and most popular ideas shown in the upper right quadrant.

Results can be used to inform decision making. My impression so far: this feels like an interesting improvement on allourideas.org for collecting and prioritizing ideas.

Improving Polis

Recognizing Polis’ transformative potential, a consortium of stakeholders in the Netherlands are working on an updated Dutch version of the platform. Their aim is to improve its usability and visualization capabilities, making it more accessible for participants, improving metadata functions as well as increasing the transparency behind the algorithms used.

Interesting it was just today that I came across this post on Bluesky by Colin Megill one of the founders of Polis:

So watch this space for a Polis 2.0 from the creators of the original main instance!

An Invitation to Collaborate

As I navigate this evolving landscape, I’m inviting others to join me. If you’ve had experiences with these platforms—or any others not listed here—I’d love to hear your insights in the comments section below. This exploration is as much about learning from each other as it is about probing the limits of what technology can achieve for collective wisdom and democracy.