Event
How Can AI Facilitate Public Participation and Deliberation? Register for I4D Café!
On July 17, 7:00-8:00 pm PDT, FNF Global Innovation Hub will host the 7th Episode of Innovation for Democracy Café: How Can AI Facilitate Public Participation and Deliberation? Click here to register for this online discussion to discover whether AI can facilitate citizens’ participation to public affairs before July 17!
People use generative AI, such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to speed up their works. One of the most well-known features of AI is it can quickly summarize, categorize, and analyze what people say and thereby generate replies that read like real human beings. This arouses our curiosity: whether we can use such feature to facilitate people’s participation and deliberation to public policies?
For example, one of the reasons why governments are reluctant to allow more the public’s participation in a policy discussion is it’s too difficult or slow to compile all the participants’ opinions with the limitation of time and space. The people will ask, if with the help of AI, can we tackle that problem? However, if we can, is there any hidden problem in using AI? For instance, how can the public without technology background to tell whether the AI tool correctly and transparently reflect people’s opinion?
There are still many unanswered expectations and worries about AI applications for participation and deliberation, and we think the best attitude should be discussing and exploring it as many times as we can instead of refusing to understand it.
To explore the answers of these questions, we will invite Dr. Alice Siu, Associate Director, Deliberative Democracy Lab to introduce the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, which equipped with a chat-bot automated moderator. With the help of AI, the performance of the chat-bot moderator can be improved and achieve most of what real human moderators can do and even what they cannot do, which can be beneficial and efficient when people have to lead a deliberation in a large scale. Moreover, the team behind the platform is developing the function to discourage people from being toxic during deliberation with the help of AI, which aims to facilitate an ideal deliberation: civil, equal, and to the point.
We will learn from Dr. Siu on how this platform works and how she and the team manage to transfer the elements of an ideal deliberation into something achievable via technology. We also hope that Dr. Siu can guide us to learn what kind of expectations to AI are realistic.
We will also invite Mr. Yen-Ting Hsu, co-founder of the Taiwan Reach-Out Association for Democracy (T-ROAD) and PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, to be the discussant. Mr. Hsu will lead us to see AI deliberation tools though the lens of an experienced practitioner who has been designing and implementing many deliberations about various topics.
Meet Our Speakers
Let’s find out whether and how AI can facilitate people’s participation with both experts!
Dr. Alice Siu, Associate Director, Deliberative Democracy Lab
Alice Siu is Associate Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law housed at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a focus in political communication, deliberative democracy, and public opinion, and her B.A. degrees in Economics and Public Policy and M.A. degree in Political Science, also from Stanford.
She is a lead collaborator on the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, a partnership with the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at Stanford. On Deliberative Polling, she has advised policymakers and political leaders around the world, at various levels of government, including in Mongolia, China, and Brazil. Her research interests in deliberative democracy include what happens inside deliberation, such as examining the effects of socio-economic class in deliberation, the quality of deliberation, and the quality of arguments in deliberation
Mr. Yen-Ting Hsu, co-founder of the Taiwan Reach-Out Association for Democracy (T-ROAD) and PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California
Yen-Ting Hsu is a co-founder of T-ROAD and a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Before attending graduate school, he worked as a local practitioner for a citywide participatory budgeting program in Taiwan, where he designed and implemented various public participation events. He has represented T-ROAD in sharing their insights and experiences from their award-winning participatory budgeting program for migrant workers at a People Powered webinar. His dissertation research investigates the mechanisms through which cultural heritage is produced by modelling how city stakeholders influence the decision-making process in neoliberal cities like Taipei.
How to Register?
Before registration, please read the following notice:
1. Deadline of registration: July 16, 2024, 12:00pm, UTC+8
2. Please note that participants who fail to register on time or provide wrong or fake information will not be accepted.
3. After registration, please remember to check your email inbox for receiving acceptance notice of the cafe and webinar link and passwords.
4. Due to the limitation of spaces that our online software can accommodate, please note that FNF preserves the rights to decide the audience list. Only people who receive confirmation email will be allowed to participate. Please check your email inbox after registration.
5. Our event date and time are: July 17, 7:00-8:00 pm PDT = 10:00-11:00 pm EDT in U.S. = July 18, 10:00-11:00am GMT+8 in Taiwan. Please check your time zone before registration.
6. Should you have any question, please send an e-mail to yawei.chou@freiheit.org
Please click here to fill in the registration form before July 16: https://forms.gle/8hm5sHv7BgDorBiHA
Thank you!