Supporting Online Discussions: Integrating AI Into the adhocracy+ Participation Platform To Enhance Deliberation

TL;DR

This paper presents an AI-augmented extension to the adhocracy+ platform, introducing debate modules to improve online discussion quality and participant engagement, validated through a large-scale user study.

Contribution

It introduces two novel AI-supported debate modules integrated into adhocracy+ to enhance online deliberation and participation.

Findings

Improved discussion civility and structure

Enhanced participant engagement and interaction

Positive usability feedback from users

Abstract

Online spaces provide individuals with the opportunity to engage in discussions on important topics and make collective decisions, regardless of their geographic location or time zone. However, without adequate support and careful design, such discussions often suffer from a lack of structure and civility in the exchange of opinions. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising avenue for helping both participants and organizers in managing large-scale online participation processes. This paper introduces an extension of adhocracy+, a large-scale open-source participation platform. Our extension features two AI-supported debate modules designed to improve discussion quality and foster participant interaction. In a large-scale user study we examined the effects and usability of both modules. We report our findings in this paper. The extended platform is available at https://github.com/mabehrendt/discuss2.0.