A small US city experiments with AI to find out what residents want

Volunteers who manage the experience were not completely. The ideas presented were examined according to the policy of moderation, and uniforms were not published. Ford says 51 % of ideas have been published, and 31 % are considered excessive. About 6 % of the ideas have not been published because they are either outside the subject or have a personal attack.

But some researchers who study techniques that can make democracy more effective about whether the input seam in this way is a reliable way to understand what society wants.

One of the problems is self-choice-for example, certain types of people tend to appear on personal forums such as the city halls. Research indicates that the elderly, homeowners and people who have high levels of education are the most vulnerable to attendance. Similar dynamics in their play among Poling Green’s residents may have decided to participate in the project.

“Self -choice is not a sufficient way to represent the views of the public,” says James Vixin, a political scientist in Stanford, who was famous for developing a process called by the trading polling, as a representative sample of the residents of the weekend collected. Other methods, used in some European governments, use groups of the jury from the population to make public policy decisions.

What is clear to everyone who studies the effectiveness of these tools is that they promise to move a city in a more democratic direction, but we will not know whether the Bolling Green experience is working until the residents see what the city does with the ideas they raised.

“You cannot set a policy on the basis of a tweet,” says Beth Simon Novik, who directs a laboratory that studies democracy and technology at North Istrin University. As it indicates, the population voted on 140 ideas, and these ideas should now be formed in real policies.

“What comes after that is the conversation between the city and the residents to develop a short proposal to something that can be implemented already,” she says. In order for the residents to trust that their voice is actually important, the city must be clear about the reason for the implementation of some ideas, not others.

Currently, the organizers have achieved general results, and will make recommendations to lead Warren Province later this year.