A Revolution in Representation: Computation Comes to Democracy's Aid

The talk opens with a recap of a workshop on group decision-making and governance held the night before, then traces the speaker's background in participatory projects. These ranged from street-level listening experiments and open-science work to the 2014 protests in Taiwan and the civic technologists who followed. It introduces Polis, an AGPL-licensed deliberation system created in 2012, which presents participants with short statements they can agree with, disagree with or pass on, and then maps the resulting opinion groups.

The middle of the talk covers case studies at national and local scale. These include Taiwan's V Taiwan process, a climate assembly in Austria, a ballot-related deliberation in Uruguay, a Slovak civil society effort to counter misinformation, a UK government policy lab, and a multinational youth consultation tied to a UN climate summit. The speaker explains the comment routing that decides which statements each person sees, how consensus statements and bridging across clusters are read, and why outreach, framing and moderation matter as much as the software itself.

The closing section takes audience questions on censorship, identity checks, reaching rural and marginalised communities, and whether results can carry binding power. The speaker argues that tools placed between citizens and their governments should be open source so that independent oversight remains possible. Practitioners are encouraged to consider how the tools they already build could support collective decisions.