#07 · During the Assembly
Which technologies are useful in assemblies? How do their democratic affordances shape participation? Which serve the interaction with the public? Which enables democratisation beyond the assembly?
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Basic tools, such as video conferencing, live polls, shared documents and annotation platforms, can facilitate access, feedback, and structured deliberation in CCAs. When using these tools, there is a need to understand their democratic affordances, meaning how their designs shape different ways of democratic participation. Open-source platforms for participation and deliberation can complement face-to-face deliberation, broadening participation before, during, and after assemblies, enabling wider consultation and transparency. These technologies can make assemblies more inclusive, help manage information, and ensure accountability, while preserving those activities that can not, or should not, be supported by technologies.
As in many other contexts, there is an increasing interest in how systems that build on large amounts of data and natural language, so-called Artificial Intelligence, can support CCAs. Early work envision that they could support recruitment and logistics (e.g. by clustering participants by demographics and interests, optimising agenda planning), scaffold learning (by generating briefings, producing summaries, or providing answers based on large amounts of data), and enrich deliberation and decision-making (by aggregating arguments, surfacing diverse perspectives, or raising controversies).
Decidim is an open-source platform used by municipalities to organise, document, and link participatory and deliberative processes. It was used in the a.o. Asamblea Ciudadana por el Clima de Cataluña for agenda-setting, documentation, feedback, and implementation tracking. While it enhances participation, deep deliberation rarely occurs online alone and works best when combined with face-to-face deliberation.
Elements of the CLIMAS toolbox, such as the methodological guidelines and evidence-based agenda framing tools, help structure deliberation and co-develop trade-offs. The KEBS (Knowledge & Evidence-Based Support) tool helps create structured agendas and dilemmas.
Under the campaign Der Klimarat fragt Österreich (the CCA asks Austria) input from the general public was gathered via the real-time polling Pol.is platform, which identifies groups with similar or differing votes, highlighting areas of greatest disagreement.
AppCivist-PB is a free open source platform for participatory budgeting that can support CCAs with proposal refinement, asynchronous public input, documentation, and tracking, while linking in-person deliberation with broader engagement (Holston et al. 2016).
