CoDesigning Participatory Tools for a New Age: A Proposal for Combining Collective and Artificial Intelligences

Abstract

In the context of a citizen lab, this article describes how a vanguard of activists, designers, scholars and participation practitioners were involved in a participatory prototyping process. CoGovern was designed as an online participation tool whose focus is to incorporate citizen preferences in local policy making. It is aimed at supporting informed and transparent participatory processes while reducing the ability of sponsoring authorities to 'cherry-pick' policy proposals and avoid providing explanations. This article proposes a decision-making process that incorporates artificial intelligence techniques into a collective decision process and whose result is mainly based on standard optimization techniques rather than vote-counting.