--- id: "workshop:why-public-engagement-why-ai" type: "InnovateUS workshop" title: "Why Public Engagement ?" url: "https://innovate-us.org/why-public-engagement-why-ai" date: "2025-09-11" duration: "60 minutes" language: "English" series: "Reboot Democracy: Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era" instructors: ["Beth Simone Noveck","Danielle Allen"] recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVSVbcwL5s0" transcript: "automatic, from the recording" source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)" licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org" --- # Why Public Engagement ? InnovateUS workshop · 11 September 2025 · 60 minutes Understand the case for public engagement in an AI era. Discuss the values, risks, and potential of AI to support civic participation—if designed well. Come away with a nine-step checklist for designing effective and efficient engagement with AI. ## Learning goals - Understand the case for public engagement in an AI era - Identify risks, benefits, and tradeoffs of using AI for civic participation ## Speakers - **Beth Simone Noveck**, Founder of InnovateUS and Director, Burnes Center for Change and the GovLab - **Danielle Allen**, Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, Harvard Kennedy School Part of the series [Reboot Democracy: Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era](https://innovate-us.org/workshop-series/democratic-engagement). Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVSVbcwL5s0 ## Transcript Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/why-public-engagement-why-ai.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/why-public-engagement-why-ai.json (every segment with its start and end second). **Agueda Quiroga** [0:02](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2) Danielle is one of the preeminent political philosophers of our time. We'll put some links to her books in the chat and to her bio. She's written many, many books. I think relevant particularly for this conversation is a recent volume that she edited from Voice to Influence Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age, published by Chicago Press, and most recently Justice by Means of Democracy, which I think very much provides the ideological foundation for the conversation we're going to have about participatory democracy. But Danielle is much more than just a scholar, or in addition, not just a scholar, but also a scholar. She is very much a practitioner and an advocate who has been studying and practicing and advocating for reconnecting people to their civic power, to governance, and that's what we're here to do today. This is a revamp, if you will, or a renovation, to steal a term that Danielle uses so eloquently, of a lecture series many of you have attended called the Reboot Democracy lecture series for a number of years. But we're doing this not as a series of lectures, but as a series of workshops. We're going to hear from leading practitioners, from doers, some of whom I see coming into the room who are here with us now, so we can explore together what does AI mean for this democratic age, and how might we do democracy and do participatory democracy better than we have done before. I've listed this as 11 plus workshops. The plus is because I'm hoping we're going to add more, and if you're in the room and you have experience and expertise to share, if something is working where you are, we'd love to hear from you, and we'd love for you to participate. So please do share your expertise now, get in touch with us, and use the chat to tell us who's here. So Danielle and I are going to have a bit of a conversation over the next half hour, and then open it up to your contributions, questions, suggestions, and engagement after that. [2:09](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=129) Please do sign up for upcoming workshops. We'll put the link in the chat as well for the whole series, and you can sign up for some of the workshops that are coming up. One last logistical note before we dive into the substance. This session is being recorded, as Zoom has already told you, but we will turn off the recording during the Q&A. We do that so that we can have a frank conversation. We have a lot of people, particularly in government here, and we want you to feel comfortable that no question is too frivolous to ask, no question is too small about how we can actually do things differently. Please right-click on your own square to rename yourselves. If you're not appearing with your name, if you'd like to add your institution and where you're coming from, we'd love to know who's here. And we encourage you also to use the chat to have a conversation. Even as Danielle and I are talking, there's so many experts here in the room. Please do use the chat to have a conversation, but use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. [3:11](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=191) You'll see it fourth in from the right if you would like to ask a question or sort of formally contribute to the conversation so that we can organize that conversation later. And finally, my colleagues have asked me to note to please mute yourself during the conversation so we can all hear one another rather than hearing your phone ringing in the background. Okay. With that, any logistical items that I've forgotten? Absolutely nothing. Perfect. Okay. I'm going to share the, if I can, should I hit share results so we can see who's here? Am I allowed to? I think that should work, but tell me if I've done something wrong with the poll. I'm going to get us started and say, just offer a few words by way of intro. Danielle is going to do the same, and then we're going to have a bit of a conversation with one another. And then as I said, open it up to conversation with you. So I very much got my start in this world of participatory democracy, especially enabled by technology. And Danielle, I don't know if you know this, but back in 1999, I started a company with the political philosopher, Ben Barber. So what everyone thinks of starting a company with a political philosopher, it will help to explain why I'm a professor and not the CEO of a software company. You know, maybe from a commercial perspective, it wasn't all that helpful. But it was a tremendously exciting endeavor because we worked together to translate many of the ideas that he had been writing about, about stronger democracy back in the early 80s, and what it could mean to reinvigorate participation in our society for the era of the web. We were really excited, and Ben, a story for another time about how Ben drove our graphic designers crazy, trying to redraw the Athenian Pnyx on the screen of the then world, fledgling worldwide web, which was not so easy to do. Our aim at the time, though, was to do [5:12](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=312) more than just enable conversation for its own sake. We wanted people to be able to have conversations, but we wanted to connect those conversations to power. We wanted to reinvigorate the kind of experimental institutions that grew up in Athenian democracy, where citizens could actively shape decisions in their community. And I think those early days were really heady times for all of us who worked in what we used to call e-democracy in those days. We saw the web as being really potentially quite transformative. But fast forward, and I would argue with some degree of self-flagellation and hand-wringing, that even though the number and variety of platforms have grown, and we've seen tremendous, and I think each of us have participated in a lot of experiments, many of which have been successful, that I don't think the promise has fulfilled itself, despite the technology that we all have at our fingertips. I think the hope that we had that institutions would incorporate, as your colleagues Glenn Weil and Audrey Tang have right, that institutions would incorporate participation into the fabric of how they work, hasn't realized itself in practice. And I think what's happening in the news and the rising tide of violence, especially in America, is only further evidence of the frustration that people feel with the inability to participate in governance and the inability to essentially wield power over the decisions that matter in their lives. So we've seen tremendous proliferation of tools, of experiments, of efforts to engage people in deliberation, but the reality is that so many of these tools have led to what Ann Applebaum refers to as the dumpster fire of our [7:15](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=435) democracy that is social media, but not the great promise of participatory democracy that we have hoped for. However, I think AI potentially could be a game changer. So what I'm hoping we're going to discuss today, and again this is meant to be a very practical conversation aimed at our colleagues, particularly in government institutions, about how we might do things differently with AI and whether AI could really help us to realize the vision that Ben had at the time, that we could use new technology to really reinvigorate our participatory democracy and do things differently. So I'm hoping today we're going to talk about what some of these challenges are to realizing a more participatory vision for how we govern, why we haven't solved that part of the problems up until now, and to have a bit of a conversation together and with everyone in the room about whether and how we think AI could be a game changer or not, whether we're totally wrong and what we have to do differently both in terms of our technology and in terms of our institutions. So let me stop there and pass it to you and I'm going to ask my colleagues, I don't know if everybody, if I can take this poll off the screen so we can see Danielle better, but hopefully you can chime in and hopefully the poll is **Danielle Allen** [8:41](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=521) on. Here we go. Perfect. Beth, first let me just say how exciting it is that our two labs are collaborating on this series. We're so grateful to you for your openness and adaptability in being interested in, you know, reimagining, renovating this webinar series. We're excited to partner **Audience** [9:04](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=544) with you on it and we agree with you, it couldn't be more important. So I'm glad 11plus will be **Danielle Allen** [9:12](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=552) working on that plus and trying to make sure that what we're doing is supporting a community of practice that really is at the leading edge of helping us all renovate our democratic institutions more generally so that we can secure healthy communities. I love your story about Ben. I did not know that you tried to start a company with Ben Barber in the 1990s and that sort of explains a lot too of how the two of us have connected to have that synergy. I mean he was a great, of course, I learned a lot from him and his arguments about stronger democracy. It's funny, in that same time period when you were working on that, I was in Chicago working on place-based local democracy, no tech involved, people in places doing things with each other. I was a relatively young assistant professor at the University of Chicago. I also had visions of Athens in my head. I had spent a lot of time studying ancient Athenian democracy. There was an incredibly empowered citizenry. They were very good at moving knowledge through the community and also at building kind of cross-cutting kinds of connections so that the different constituencies in the city were really feeding together, mixing things up, bridging and forming a really kind of connected societal fabric. At any rate, I landed in Chicago and I had realized that the city of Chicago and the south side where I was was about the same scale as ancient Athens. And so I thought, well, if they could do it in ancient Athens, if we considered democracy in a really place-based way in America, we could really bring new energy to sort of lots of nodes of democracy around the country and build from place out to a healthier democracy. I tell that story because I think that actually the moment that we're in is precisely one where the opportunity is to bring place and technology together. I think the early movement of bringing tech into democracy wasn't very oriented to place. There was a sense that tech let us open up to sort of global context, global networks, and it wasn't always grounded in the kind of use case of specific social and political [11:12](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=672) communities. I was really, you know, trying hard in the 90s to hold tech at bay. So I'm sort of the opposite of you. I was not a person who jumped in with both feet. Instead, I kept saying, no, no, no, no. I'm doing this real democracy thing with real people in real places. And over the last decade, of course, all of my friends in the technology space have been, you know, started banging me over the head with a club and saying, you know, Danielle, you're completely missing the boat. If you can't see how technology is going to transform everything we do, including politics, then you're never going to be able to actually build the healthy democracy that you care about. So that is what brought me into the technology conversation, the recognition that indeed technology is transforming what we can do in all of our institutions. And so I agree with Beth. I do think that the arrival of AI is potentially a game changer. And I think the real question is how we harness it for core healthy democracy goals. Again, for me, harnessing it is about putting place and technology together. That's why this series is so exciting. [12:18](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=738) So many of you are working on healthy governance in specific places. So I want to say two more words about healthy governance and the opportunity that we have to upgrade our representative institutions so that they can succeed in 21st century conditions. By succeed, I mean that they should be responsive to the people and be felt as responsive. There's a good, strong feedback loop that they be effective in their decision making and then also effective in implementation. And that also requires a reliance on design principles like transparency and accountability alongside the principle of efficiency. But an important thing to say is that our representative institutions are in some sense sort of the spine of our society. And we can think of that spine as consisting of three vertebrae. First, there is citizen participation. That is a key aspect of representation that people are able to funnel their points of view and perspectives into our shared decision making mechanisms. Then the second vertebra is decision makers deciding. [13:29](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=809) Whether those are elected officials or appointed civil servants, people have to make some decisions. And then the third vertebra is the implementation moment. And that can come either in the form of enforcement of regulations or in the delivery of services. Now, I believe our job here in 2025, headed into 2026, is essentially to give an upgrade to that spine of our society in our representative institutions by thinking about how technology can help us do the citizen participation piece better, help us do the decision maker deciding piece better, and help us do implementation better. But the real trick is that you have to actually hook each of those vertebrae up together. So we're going to really focus on citizen participation in this webinar series, why it's important, how we can do better. We've got concrete examples, great work in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for example, where people have been using Polis and Google Jigsaw Sensemaker to elicit a broader range of opinion in the city, to find minority perspectives, to find points of consensus that weren't previously visible, and feed that all into the development of a 25-year plan for the city. Engage California is doing similar work, also seeking to improve the sensemaking that supports decision making. So we have a lot of concrete examples of how we can improve citizen participation. And one of the lessons I hope we'll pull out throughout the series is how we make sure that that gets hooked up to decision making, gets hooked up to implementation. [14:59](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=899) So that there really is a feedback loop. That's where responsiveness comes from. And that's really one of the important criteria of success for citizen participation. So I will stop there with that broad table setting, but I, like Beth, I'm just so grateful to all of you for giving of your time and energy and creativity to this incredibly important conversation. And we have a lot of energy and creativity and expertise in the room. I see a number of the folks who you have name-checked actually here. So I wanna just offer a reminder to please use the chat. It will, to have a, what I call a conversation in four dimensions, put any questions, especially for Danielle, in the chat. But I want, and plug to say that folks from Bowling Green and Jigsaw will be here as part of the series. The folks from the Design California Project will also be here specifically to talk about what they've done and how they've done it. [16:02](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=962) And for our practitioners and our institution leaders, our decision makers and implementers in the room, all our speakers have been asked going forward to really talk about the how-to's of engagement. Very nitty gritty, you know, don't be put off by the fact that this is being kicked off by two professors. We're gonna talk about how much it cost, how many people it took, how much time it took. What did you do first? What did you do second? Because ultimately I think the goal here is for us to engender more engagement and more participation. And maybe Danielle, let me just ask you a little bit about and tease out, I love the kind of three spines idea and the connection between the engagement piece, the decision-making and the implementation. Just tease out a little bit more of those connections and help us to understand, I don't think it, why we do participation. Because as obvious it may seem as the right thing to do and a democratic nice to have when we get busy and budgets get low, it always falls by the wayside back to the why we haven't done it. [17:15](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1035) So I think it does make sense and it was on the menu for today to really talk about and articulate more about what the different visions are for why we do it. And do you think in this day and age, given what's going on in the world, are there reasons that are more important now than others for why to engage? I appreciate that, Beth, that question. And I also appreciate your naming the fact that we've kicked this off with two professors. The rest of the series, we'll dive into the nitty gritty, but your question is an invitation to zoom way out, honestly, right? To the question of why does civic participation matter anyway, and even especially now in the 21st century? So I'm gonna take you up on the invitation to answer that question. So folks, you'll have to bear with me for a little bit as I truly am a political philosopher here in this conversation. The simple fact of the matter is that democracy itself is a technology, okay? It was discovered in antiquity many, many, long, long time ago. [18:19](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1099) It was rediscovered in the 18th century It disappeared again. when people glued the idea of democracy that is popular participation together with the concept of representation. And it was gluing those two things together that permitted the sort of scaling up But then that leads to the question of, okay, of popular participation. well, what kind of discovery was this Why do we invest in it? about popular participation? And there's a few different things that this technology of participation delivers for us as a society. One, it delivers vastly improved information flows. And at the end of the day, all decision-making depends on the quality of the information flows into the decision. So it's a big, complex apparatus for hoovering up as much information as there possibly is in society so that we can make the best possible kind of decision. Now you might say, well, but hey, like AI can hoover up all that information now. Like why do we need participation to hoover up information? And there are a lot of reasons why AI can't replace what humans have. [19:25](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1165) Not all of our knowledge is represented in data. So data is a tranche of what we all know and think and have learned and so forth, but it does not capture all of human experience and perspective. And so we would lose all of that if we only relied on data tools sort of scraping the web. So that's why we still need real people and we need to activate the agency of real people as thinkers and contributors. So that's thing one, is the sort of knowledge power that comes from participation. Thing two is the issue of legitimacy. At the end of the day, any given society is stable only to the degree that people support it. That doesn't matter if you're an autocracy or a democracy. Autocracies get very, very weak if there is no strong sense of legitimacy or connection to the institutions. Often autocracies depend on people feeling protected. So even on autocracies, there is a need for popular opinion to have some meaningful degree of support for the institutions. Now you look at all the possibilities, again, participation is actually the best way of achieving legitimacy. [20:30](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1230) So yes, you can sometimes generate decisions faster without participation, but they will be thinner and more brittle. They won't have sustainability. So it's actually more efficient over the long-term to build in popular participation so that the decisions have that sustained legitimacy behind them. So that's the second thing. **Audience** [20:51](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1251) Where do I go? Come back here. **Danielle Allen** [20:52](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1252) The third kind of power that comes from participation, and sometimes this is almost the most important one for human beings, is just plain freedom, all right? It's freedom. Now, why is that the case? Because what participation is, is a counterweight to other kinds of power. So again, you can have power concentrated in an executive, or you can have power concentrated in the market. And if you let power be concentrated there without the counterweight of popular participation, then at the end of the day, that erodes the sort of space for action And that's not a fancy point. for ordinary people. It's not a political point. It's the point that history teaches over and over and over again. If you want to protect the space for agency you have to have a counterweight for ordinary people, to the other kinds of power that exist in society. So information, legitimacy and sustainability, and freedom. [21:52](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1312) Okay? Those are the things that we get from participation. So why have given that? First of all, do you agree or disagree with my assessment that we have not done as well as we could have and needed to? And what's your diagnosis? So let me ask you that first. And then if we think we've not done as well as we needed to or could have given the tools at our disposal up until now, why not? Thank you, Beth. Thank you. These questions are great. I love these questions. So I said democracy is a technology and it is. And we also have other technologies. And in the nineties, we invented the internet, for example, for starters. And so a few things have happened. For starters, the technology of democracy that was invented in the 18th century was not designed for contemporary conditions. At the most basic level, it was designed for a much slower information flow and for an information flow that was fragmented by geographic dispersal. [22:58](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1378) So I won't bore people with the details, but it was literally designed in a way that was taking into account the kind of basic expectation that it would be hard for people to circulate knowledge other than through the political institutions. And that condition has changed completely and that destabilizes our existing institutions. And let me interrupt you just for one moment. Can people hear? Is there an audio issue? **Audience** [23:23](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1403) I see a note in the chat about, and I see some thumbs up that people can't hear. I don't know. Okay, good. Keep going. Sorry to interrupt. **Danielle Allen** [23:30](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1410) Okay. So all I was gonna say was, the 18th century technology that is democracy, now it's under pressure because of 21st century conditions. Simultaneously, we have some new technologies. And in the nineties, I think what happened was, so why didn't we take advantage of technology as well as we might've done? Or why did we get into trouble? A, I think we didn't fully understand the specific vulnerabilities of the 18th century technology that is democracy. And therefore we didn't know how to correct for those vulnerabilities with new technologies. But B, I think the other thing we lost sight of is that as a technology, democracy is fundamentally a place-based technology. Right? That's why we have districts. And doesn't your city and you've got wards or you've got counties, your state is divided into counties and then we've got congressional districts. Democracy is a place-based technology. And in the nineties, we really saw technology as not place-based. We saw it as enabling precisely all the things that didn't depend on place. [24:34](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1474) And so there's all kinds of stuff we figured out that way. Social media took off because it didn't depend on place. And so we have new capacities, new ways of organizing ourselves. But now I think the job is to recognize that democracy is a place-based technology and to actually embed technology into helping that place-based technology work better. So now Beth, what do you think? Why do you think we didn't make more progress in the nineties? I think, so yes, and. I think there are a few additional reasons that I would add to it. One is I think the web, and this relates to your, our kind of excitement and enthusiasm about a world without borders that the web gave us. I do think that there are interesting innovations now that we're seeing around democratic reinvention in non-contiguous, non-geographic environments as we form new versions of a health department and new versions of governance in places that we're reinventing the geographical borders. [25:42](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1542) But I'll put that to one side for a moment. I think what the web gave us that we were so excited about is the ability to talk. And we did not focus nearly enough on our ability to listen, number one. Number two, there was a huge amount of enthusiasm, energy, and passion from the civic sector, from the nonprofit sector, from the research sector around how do we make it easier for each of us to speak? And we have not had nearly enough investment in your connection, that spine between the three pieces. So that first part about citizen participation, how it connects to decision-making and implementation is not a place we've focused nearly enough. And I think we could get into a lot of structural reasons why we haven't done that, that has to do with education and technology and where our focus has been and the things we've chosen to study and to do. But we were so, I think we've been so giddy about the talking and we were so excited at the time about, my gosh, we could each express ourselves. [26:50](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1610) I mean, it was so, I think for people under a certain age who are here who didn't live through the transition, the kind of birth of the World Wide Web, the recognition, like it was so exciting that each of us had a megaphone because we were coming from a world in which not only did we have 500 channels of TV and radio, but if you're over a certain age, we had four channels of television. So the notion that suddenly each of us could have a blog or I'm gonna date myself by naming some other platforms we used to yap on, like that megaphone thing was so exciting. And then suddenly when you give everybody a megaphone, nobody can hear anymore. Number two, I think that lack of attention That's number one. to decision-making, to how it connects up, which is why the two examples you gave at the outset of the work in Bowling Green and the work with Engaged California are both so exciting because those address that last mile problem, which is how do I actually take all of this input? [27:55](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1675) And a lot of the examples we're gonna talk about, and this is where AI comes in, is connecting that last mile back to institutions and making it possible not only for institutions to hear and to listen with the scarce hours and attention that they have, but for each of us to hear one another in ways that were not possible before when we were all talking. And the last point I'll make, and this one is a little bit more controversial and I'm gonna make it and then push it back to you, is comes back to your point about why we engage. I think we've been particularly excited about this idea of legitimacy, which ties back to each of us having the ability or not each of us, it may be a representative number of each of us or some number of us to speak. And those arguments about what I would call collective intelligence, the information gathering aspects, have really, those are two siloed conversations. We have a world of democratic practitioners, researchers and others over here. [29:03](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1743) We often have a collective intelligence or an open innovation community over here. And these worlds don't often talk to one another. And I think to our detriment, I think we have placed a lot of emphasis on how to do the legitimacy thing right, but not as much emphasis on how to do the collective intelligence or the decision-making piece right. And we've missed that kind of institutional hookup. So let me pause there and just push it back to you because I think that in the academy, we have sometimes done ourselves a disservice by not studying some of those second and third prongs that you've raised. Thanks Beth. No, I think that's right. I would agree 100%. And what I would say though is, I think the challenge is that part of hooking up the vertebrae. is about using design principles for each vertebra that get it ready to get hooked up. [30:07](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1807) By that I mean, so in the civic participation space, I think you're right, we have focused on legitimacy. And so that means that probably the kind of overarching design principle people have focused on when they design citizen engagements is inclusion, right? Who's participating? Are we opening up that town hall that only folks who don't work can come to because of the hours? And you know, people with kids can't come to and those kinds of questions. And inclusion matters. And AI can make that even stronger, especially with things like language access and the like. But the point is that there are other design principles that matter as well. And one of them is what in 18th century vocabulary, people called energy. We could call it efficiency now and that is just playing the ability to actually get decisions done and get them through. And so that's where there can be a trade off between inclusion, for example, and energy. And so I think, but if you're designing for both of those things, when you design citizen engagement, then it actually means you're thinking about how does this set decision makers up to do their job? How does this set implementers up to do their job? And the point is really that those two questions have to become part of the design work when we're designing the engagements themselves. So just a quick announcement again, we're getting close. I could talk to you for hours, but we want to open it up to everybody else in a moment. So if you have a question, please put it in the Q&A just to make it a little bit easier. Again, that's the button at the bottom of your screen. Please continue to chat with one another in the chat, but to ensure that we see a question, if you could put it in the Q&A. Also, if you have any insights to share, I see we have practitioners here from South Australia to Mexico, I can see, and everywhere in between. So we'd love to make sure to hear from you, but let me use our last few minutes of our chat to just ask you to advance the conversation to AI. Is it different? Is it a [32:10](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=1930) repeat of the web? Is it different? I know the answer is it's different because we wouldn't be exploring this if we didn't think there was some promise. Why do you think it's promising and why do you think we're, how do we get it right this time? Well, so I do think AI is promising. I think of AI as roughly akin to electricity, right? It's going to work its way through everything. And at the end of the day, the question really is, the question you're asking, how can we sort of electrify everything in ways that help us? For me, the design principles really matter that you always need to know what you're designing for as you start to put the tools to work. And so this is a place where I do think the tech community has practices that are helpful to the governance community. So the tech community is quite used to the idea of working with design principles. I'm not sure that that is as common or comfortable for the governance community because often I think in the space of governance, we've thought you have a policy blueprint with a checklist and then your job is just to do everything on the checklist. Whereas actually, what we might need to do is really sort of have some learning about the design principles so that then people are empowered to answer the question of how in my place can I hit the target of these design principles of inclusion on the one hand and energy on the other hand. [33:31](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2011) So I think in that regard, honestly, we need a little bit of sort of different professional development for folks who are in the public sector. So that's, I think, a really important part of putting it to work. Of course, the tools themselves do have huge new capacities. I mentioned already, for example, the issue of language access. So that's the kind of, the challenges around language are it's a barrier we can just take away at this point, which is super exciting. We also have the issue of the challenge of public sector work is rests on a kind of just mountains and mountains of documents that can take people just too much time to go through in order to assemble the information that they need to support decision making. We can remove the mountains of time that are needed to master the data, the documents that are produced by governance processes over time. So you can go through the experience of either setting up engagements or decision making or implementation and all those places that are the pain points, the barriers that are sort of really slowing things down. Probably there's an AI solution for every single one of those. And so that's what one has to start doing is kind of harvesting those serious pain points and considering how do we use AI tools to address those pain points. So that's, but it is really case-based. There's not an a priori answer to exactly where and how AI fits in. And I think that that's a hundred percent right. And that's one of the things that I'm most excited about to just offer 30 seconds. And I won't take more than that because I wrote something about it earlier this week that you posted and I put up and I will put it in the chat is that I think because there isn't one way, there isn't just one way that AI can help. And there isn't one way ideally that we should be engaging because there are so many of those opportunities where we need information, legitimacy, you know, and opportunities for voice and action and people to be able to express themselves. I think one of the big challenges with [35:33](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2133) how much it's frankly cost us up until now with everybody having a megaphone, it is just so costly to run engagements in terms of time, in terms of energy, in terms of attention, in terms of dollars that we've had to pick one. We've always, if we've done it, it's been, you know, it's been a pick one off the menu. What I'm excited about is that we can now pick many off the menu. We can say, look, as we did in New Jersey, very recently, we're trying to understand the problems that people are experiencing when we talk about the relationship between AI and work. And we wanted to know what people thought were the most urgent problems when we ran our AI task force. So we went out and we asked people and we asked private sector and we asked public sector, and we could do both of those at significant scale. But then we wanted to go out and ask people about solutions to those problems. And so we were able to knit together multiple forms of engagement, which I keep nicknaming combinatorial democracy, just the idea that we don't have to choose just one method, we could do a deliberative dialogue with a representative sample of citizens. And we could go out and ask a group of experts on a particular topic. And we can do both of these and we don't have to pick. And I think that's the thing I'm really excited about is it's not sort of choosing winners among our favorite methods or tools. Democracy, it's our ability now to say we can knit these things together and strengthen the spine that you talked about. [36:59](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2219) Okay. Sorry, Daniel. I'm sorry. Last word there. That's all right. It's okay. Okay. We have a lot of comments. Thank you. In the Q&A, we have a number of open questions now in the Q&A, and I want to invite people also to keep using the chat. I will do my best to try to now having just spoken to read these at the same time. And Daniel, you might want to do the same. And we can see some of the things we can answer. And one thing I'll just say preemptively is this is very intentionally a sort of broad brushstrokes conversation. What's coming up in the next 10 sessions, as you will see from the topics, and again, we'll put, if Jess and Agata, you could put the topics again that are coming up. We have a lot of very nitty gritty things coming up with very specific examples. So is there something, have you had a chance to see them? Is there something you want to pick off first, or shall I ask you off the list? I think you should feel free, whichever one you think is best for conversation. I have not been able to read them yet. Okay. Me either. So I'm good. I will do the same thing at the same time here. But I think the trying to stick with where we're sort of, where we're at on AI, Duncan is asking this question about how AI can really help us kind of scale what we're talking about and support some of that real-time sensemaking that you've discussed. So maybe let's pick up on that AI conversation right there, and then we'll get into some of the risk questions that people are asking about. [38:27](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2307) What have you seen that you're really excited about? What examples are really working? And where do you see AI being really promising? Okay, great. No, thank you. And I think, if you don't mind, when we, as we move along, I'd love to pick up the question too, that's about place in an interconnected world. Okay. Jump in and summarize it. If you want to do that first, that's fine. I'm playing catch up because there's so much good stuff here. There is a lot of good stuff. All right. I'll take this one, and then we'll come back to the scale and sensemaking question. Okay. And I think those are two good, meaningless. So this is Jose says, Danielle mentioned democracy as a place-based technology. What does place mean in a profoundly interconnected world? And I just think that's a wonderful question. And I think what I'd love to share is that we do live in this extraordinary moment where new kinds of human organization are now available to us. So in other words, democracy gave us jurisdictions, municipalities, counties, states, et cetera. And if humans have always had institutions and organizations like nonprofits and firms, we now live in a world where we also get to use a thing called a network. And it truly is a different kind of human organizational form. [39:49](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2389) And so, and digital tools allow us to build networks without reference to place as Beth pointed to earlier. And so for me to say democracy is a place-based technology, doesn't mean that you should only be doing place-based things. Absolutely. There are lots of ways you can bring networks or put networks to work for the work that one needs to do in a particular jurisdiction. And as Beth said, the job is the knitting together. We have so many tools in the toolkit that the hard part really is learning how to do the knitting. And I think that's what this whole webinar series will be about. That will be naming the different kinds of tools in the toolkit. So scaling and sensemaking being two tools that we're going to talk about right now. But the real question is how to put them to work. And for that, that's where you do need the kind of guiding design principles. And it's a little tricky, but those sort of design principles aren't necessarily principles for developers. I mean, they may or may not use them. [40:54](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2454) They're actually design principles for civic leaders, for the people who are responsible for civic infrastructure. And importantly, at this point, civic infrastructure has to integrate the analog and the digital. So everybody in this call, I'm going to assume, is a designer of civic infrastructure. Civic infrastructure at this point integrates the analog and the digital. We're going to want to name the design principles for how you develop civic infrastructure. And then when you have those principles clearly in view, then the job is which tools help us achieve those principles. So scaling and sensemaking, let's go to those. Those are tools. How do we use them? What do we use them for? Beth, I've been talking a lot. So although I could say more here, let me pass it to you, if you don't mind, to go ahead and also engage with the concrete on those. I will, in the interest of time, sorry, in my poor multitasking here, I'm going to bring in some additional questions at the same time from some of our audience. But I will say just a quick advertisement on questions of scale. We're going to have a chat a little later in the series precisely about scale. And I think we're going to hear from a lot of people who've been able to do things with very, very large numbers of people. And there's been really interesting research done on precisely this question of how do we get larger. But I think this issue of larger, it's on the one hand, a really important question, because it allows us to get away from opportunities for engagement that are limited only to 10 or 12 or 20 people, a necessary evil that we've had to practice because of the costs to doing anything that's larger. [42:40](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2560) And the UK consultation unit has talked about just the number of human power hours it takes to analyze the comments, just the number of pounds it takes, of flesh and of money in the UK and elsewhere to synthesize a very large number of comments. When you go out and ask people, and it's what it caused, and I started the post this week with, I was very profoundly negatively impressed when I went to Singapore not too long ago, and they said, look, we started out doing citizen juries, but it was so expensive and costly even to have 50 people in a conversation that they stopped doing it. So yes, we can get bigger and create more opportunities for people to hear their own voice for that legitimacy. But what's so exciting is the work that's happening now and figuring out how to synthesize that in ways, again, the decision makers can hear and that we can hear each other talk. [43:42](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2622) So really exciting stuff, for example, and again, we'll hear from a number of these, and next week we'll hear from the folks at People Powered, who will talk about what platforms are out there and precisely how that work is being done. But even without any fancy citizen engagement platform, the New Jersey Environmental Protection Agency is using readily available tools to go out and just ask people about the future of their park and synthesize that feedback. But let me get to some of these other questions here. Sorry, I want to bring in the, we have several questions that really relate to what these platforms are. These are private, unaccountable commercial platforms that, as we know, are often subject to the whims of the CEOs that run them, whose motives are not to strengthen and deepen democracy. So I think, do you see, are there things that we need to do to, can we use these tools? Do we need to use different tools? Are there things we need to do if we're going to create the technical infrastructure for the participation we want to do? Absolutely. So, I mean, I think, for starters, So if you're using a tool like POLIS, then what it gives you the chance to do, at this point there are multiple tools that do this, there are a dozen different tools that make it possible for people to use natural language contributions in the context of sharing their opinion about something. [45:22](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2722) So the fact that people can use natural language, they can just speak in their own voice to communicate their opinion as opposed to ticking a box on a survey or something of the sort, expands the sort of the data and then the kind of metadata that you can use to analyze the opinion space of a community. And in order to prepare for that work though, of course, you have to always connect use of the tool to the recruitment of people into participation and use of the tool. So you're going to need all kinds of analog forms of infrastructure to put the tool to work in the ways that will be most useful to you. And relatedly, if the tool has this power because of its ability to process natural language and to sort of clarify the solution space to do discovery beyond what humans are capable of doing, if that's what you've got, you also need to know precisely what kind of decision-making landscape you're hooking it up to. [46:22](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2782) So there's various kinds of human analytics that are necessary that support how you decide to embed the use of this tool. So in that regard, I think what I'm trying to communicate is understanding the functionality of specific tools is critical so that you can put it to work in its most powerful way. And that's where the person who's the expert on the tool is not going to be the expert on recruiting participants into the process of it. It's not going to be the expert on how you want to define inclusion, say, to make sure that you have the participants participating in such a way that you're getting a slice of your community designed to support, for instance, the goals of legitimacy. So that's where you need multiple people around the table together, I think, in the design process. Is there a tool you wish existed that doesn't yet exist? Is there something that you want to see built? We have a couple of different questions about kind of the design principles that I think are getting to, you know, what do we need to build that we don't have yet? [47:26](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2846) Or do we have it? I think we have a lot of tools that we're not putting to full use yet. And so for me, I think we're in the phase of work where the job is to really understand all those tools and start putting them to work. And so, again, for that, it's really, you know, the first job is to sort of identify, okay, these are the places where we really want to improve citizen participation. We want people to see that there's more responsiveness. So we want to strengthen the feedback loop to what they're doing. Or we want to change the sort of quality of information that we're generating from a participation process or lower the cost for it, sort of all of those things. And then we have a plethora of tools. I mean, we mentioned Polis. We've mentioned Google Jigsaw. And sort of vTaiwan is another version of Polis, of course. There is the terrific work that comes out of the MIT Digital Media Lab, which has produced a sort of device that you can use for focus groups to capture audio recordings and then do sensemaking from that. [48:27](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2907) So I think that's one of the, you know, what will happen over the course of these webinars is that the many tools that now exist will be put on display for people to achieve better understanding of. And I think to your point very much, the details about how they get used, because there is so much around just the design of the process by which we use these tools that essentially to me are just better word processors, better ways of making sense of language. And it's how we use them. How, though, are we going to hack the political process? Look, no one wants to give up power. Is there something? The reasons that we have not been as successful with engagement as we would have liked to have something to do with the platforms and how we've used them, have something to do with the cost and expense. But it also has to do with those in political power not being interested in or willing to recognize the opportunity for tapping the collective intelligence of our communities. Is there something now in this AI moment that we can do differently? [49:32](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=2972) Is there some experiment that we should try that you think might push the needle with the decision makers and the implementers, if you will? So let me pause there. Well, I'll give an answer, Beth. But then I also would be curious about what your answer is on that. So, and I know that these answers are somewhat dissatisfying to people who want to hear an answer, which is along the lines of X tool will deliver Y. And those are not the answers I'm giving, as I'm sure everybody can hear. And the reason I'm not giving those answers is because the work that we need, excuse me, the work we need to do is about use cases. It really is about who is going to use the tools for what purpose. And so, no, I don't think there's a way to hack the who, okay? I actually do think what we have to do is identify the innovators. This will often be people who are more at the margins of power and not at the center of power. [50:33](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3033) And so I do think that in that regard, we have to sort of find opportunities for the places where people are in crisis, like the Engage California example, where the wildfires in Los Angeles produced a moment where something different had to be done. And so into that need for difference came the possibility of using new tools. So you have moments of crisis, people who are not at the center of power, so they actually have the bandwidth to experiment. And transformation often moves from the margins to the center. So I do think that is going to be a part of the story in this instance. In an effort to bring in one or two more questions we have from the audience, there's a number of things. You have to answer this next one, because I've talked too much. We want you to talk too much. That is why we pay you the big bucks here in this free workshop series. I will promise to answer them. Since I'm starting the thought here, we have a number of questions about kind of bias or exclusion and fostering more engagement and more participation. [51:35](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3095) And then I promise to give a short answer to both. But maybe just spend a minute on the amplification of risk and bias in this AI world. Is that a relevant question in your mind? It's definitely a relevant question. And this community is also a community that can do something about it. And let me just give a concrete example here. So this comes out of work from Vox Pop, I want to say, which does a lot of work with legislatures around the world. And or Pop Vox. Sorry, I always get it the wrong way around. Pop Vox. And I don't want to sort of say too much because this is sort of their work. But the short of it is they've been doing a lot of work with Caribbean legislatures that are about converting documents, paper into digital artifacts. Thank you, Beth. Yes, Pop Vox. And in the process of doing that, of course, they've surfaced what will be no surprise that the LLMs typically have translators and they have multiple kinds of English, but the kinds of English they have in the translators are Canadian English and British English and US English and Australian English, And so they, that's a form of bias not Caribbean English. [52:58](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3178) that is meaning that the LLMs can't work as well in the Caribbean context. But so what they are doing then is using the work that they're doing to create a new LLM that has the capacity to translate Caribbean English. So in other words, I think we will consistently surface biases as we do this work, but that our job is not just to surface them, it's to correct them. And to recognize that we in this community of those who are designers of civic infrastructure, we actually have the power to drive change in how the tools and platforms themselves are designed. I think that's 100% right. And it's why we need so much more experimentation. I come back to the point about trying many, many, many things, trying more use cases, and why I hope that many of the people here, some of whom are already doing exciting things and hopefully will learn from one another. And if we can do more to amplify those use cases and get people to share, for example, Claudius Lieven from Hamburg will be here talking about the DPAS platform, an open source platform that they have built to foster citizen engagement in how they do urban planning in Hamburg. [54:07](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3247) But more excitingly now, in nine different cities, we will have folks here from the Belgian company GoVocal who do work, they have an open source platform and they do work with 500 different communities. And we'll be hearing from Copenhagen and Vienna talking about how they do things in practice, what works, what doesn't, how they're combining online and offline and different forms of engagement, again, tied to decision making. So that's really our goal here is to see if we can proliferate some of this learning. We recognize that there are busy professionals here who are practicing engagement, and we hope to forge more of that so our commitment to you is to get you out of here on time. I know we did not answer nearly all of the questions or tap into all of Danielle's very significant expertise here. We hope you're going to come back to join us And we're not limited to stopping with the ones for the coming sessions. that you will see listed on your screen and they're getting updated now. [55:11](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3311) If you have expertise to share, if you have a project to share, we would love to hear from you. We'll put some emails and other things in the chat. The recording will be posted along with a transcript and a summary, and we're capturing all of the questions in the hope that we can use some materials after this and some future workshops to answer the questions and the suggestions that you have. So I want to thank all of our partners. I want to thank especially Agata and Sarah for doing all the heavy lifting on getting us to the starting line for this series, to all of you for participating, and we hope you'll come back to join us and to Danielle and her whole team often and early, for their collaboration on this exciting experiment. So we look forward to seeing you. Jess, Agata, what's our next one? **Agueda Quiroga** [55:59](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3359) Our next one is the People Power team on which is the right tool for democratic engagement, and it's September 24th. Please, I hope to see you there. It's posted into the chat. Fantastic. Thank you, everybody, for your engagement, and we'll share all the resources online after this. Danielle, thank you so much. **Danielle Allen** [56:24](https://youtu.be/mVSVbcwL5s0?t=3384) Thank you, Beth. Appreciate the conversation. Take care. Bye-bye. * * * Original page: https://innovate-us.org/why-public-engagement-why-ai · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org