Deliberative Democracy with the Online Deliberation Platform

James Fishkin1, Nikhil Garg1, Lodewijk Gelauff1, Ashish Goel1, Kamesh Munagala2, SukolsakSakshuwong1, Alice Siu1, Sravya Yandamuri2

1Stanford University2Duke University

AbstractWe introduce the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, aweb-based platform that facilitates constructive discussionson civic issues with the use of an automated moderator. Theautomated moderator performs this function by stimulatingparticipants to consider arguments from both sides of all pro-posals, maintaining civility in the discussion, encouraging eq-uitable participation by all participants, and providing a struc-tured collaboration phase for participants to come up with asmall set of questions or action items. We will demo the func-tionality of this platform in the context of its primary intendedapplication, that of online Deliberative Polling.

1 IntroductionWhile the Internet has revolutionized many aspects of hu-man life, it has not been a positive force in large scale civicdeliberation – in fact, open chat-groups and message boardsoften devolve into name calling and non-productive conver-sation. This societal problem serves as the broad motiva-tion for the platform we wish to introduce. More specif-ically, the platform is meant to build upon DeliberativePolling (Fishkin 2011), a framework pioneered by the Stan-ford Center for Deliberative Democracy (Figure 1). Thisframework promotes substantive civic discourse and has hadgreat success. However, it has been challenging to scale thisapproach to large online groups, the main difficulty beingrecruiting and training neutral moderators. Without moder-ation, the small group discussion could either splinter intosmaller groups of like-minded individuals, or be dominatedby a few loud individuals, or go off topic entirely. The Stan-ford Online Deliberation Platform intends to tackle this chal-lenge by developing an automated moderator.

2 The deliberative polling processIn the current state of democracies, citizens often engage intribalism, only speaking in echo-chambers with others of thesame beliefs. This cycle results in most people never hearingalternate viewpoints and eventual deadlock (Fishkin 2018).The goal of deliberative polling is to provide citizens withan opportunity to consider and discuss difficult issues in anenvironment that facilitates informed deliberation. Partici-pants are chosen by taking a random sample from society.An expert advisory committee creates an agenda for delib-eration on a specific issue, along with briefing materials for

Figure 1: Deliberative Polling (DP) in Malawi. DP has beenused over 100 times in over 70 countries, and is constitution-ally mandated in Mongolia.

the participants containing information and arguments fromall sides of the issue. Using these materials, the participantshave an informed deliberation on a topic, during which theyalso collectively come up with questions for experts. In orderto gauge the effectiveness of this process, they are polled be-fore and after the deliberation. Together with a demographicsurvey, this provides insights into how the broader popula-tion would think about the issue if it had a chance to delib-erate in the same fashion.

This form of deliberative polling has been conductedmany times, and with various collaborators, over the pastthree decades. In many cases, it has resulted in significantpolicy changes (Fishkin 2018). As one example, a deliber-ative poll conducted in Texas in 1998 showed an increasein support for paying more in monthly utility bills for thesupport of renewable energy from 52% to 84%. Using theseresults, the Texas state legislature continued to make deci-sions that brought the state from last to first place in windpower in the US (Luskin, Fishkin, and Plane 1999).

3 The Online Deliberation PlatformThe Stanford Online Deliberation Platform (Figure 2) lookssuperficially similar to other video chatting platforms, suchas Google Hangouts and Skype. However, there are impor-tant differences. The platform includes an automated mod-erator “bot” which enforces a speaking queue: participants

Figure 2: The Stanford Online Deliberation Platform. Note the queue with a timer, agenda management elements, and controlelements for the participants to self-moderate.

must click a button to enter a queue to speak for a limitedlength of time or to briefly interrupt the current speaker. Theplatform also integrates an agenda, which the participantsare encouraged to follow by means of nudges. The platformtranscribes the active speaker in real-time and monitors foroffensive content (both using an external API). If offensivecontent is detected, or the conversation seems stalled on anagenda item, the bot solicits feedback from the participantsto decide whether to block a user or advance the agenda tothe next item, respectively. There are several other subtlefeatures to replicate the functionality of a human moderator.The bot also integrates a collaboration phase, where afterthe conversation, the participants collectively come up witha small number of questions or action items.

None of the mainstream consumer video-conference ser-vices provide enough fine grained control to build the kindof functionality we needed; hence, our moderator bot sits ontop of a custom video-conferencing system that we built us-ing Twilio’s WebRTC-based APIs (Twilio Blog Post 2018).

4 The proposed demoThe demo will involve us setting multiple laptops at the con-ference venue. Participants will be able to observe or partic-ipate in an ongoing deliberation, and also observe or partici-pate in a collaboration task. They will be able to experiencewhat it feels like to be in a video-conferencing system thatenforces a queue, much like Robert’s Rules of Order. Theywill also be able to experience how the presence of a mod-erator bot alters their perception of norms of conduct, andhow we trade off automated moderation with nudging par-ticipants to monitor group behavior, equitable speaking time,and agenda progress. We have provided a brief video as sup-plementary material to give the committee a flavor of whatthe demo will look like.

Our goal over the next year is to add more natural lan-guage processing (NLP) tools (e.g. automatic agenda man-agement, automatic flagging of novel content, and auto-mated relevance scoring of the arguments being made) to theplatform. We would also like to improve the design and us-ability of this platform, and instrument the platform to mea-sure the quality of the conversation. For NLP and usability,we would like to get feedback on which features to priori-tize; for instrumentation, we are looking for advice on whichmetrics to measure and optimize against.

Acknowledgement: This work is supported by the NationalScience Foundation under Grant No. CCF-1408784, CCF-1637397, CCF-1637418, and IIS-1447554; by researchawards from Adobe and Facebook; by the Stanford HAIinitiative; and by the Office of Naval Research Grant No.N00014-15-1-2786. We would like to acknowledge LiubovNikolenko for her contribution to this platform.

ReferencesFishkin, J. S. 2011. When the people speak: Deliberativedemocracy and public consultation. Oxford Univ. Press.Fishkin, J. 2018. Yes, ordinary citizens can de-cide complex issues. The Wall Street Journal.https://www.wsj.com/articles/yes-ordinary-citizens-can-decide-complex-issues-1533310053.Luskin, R. C.; Fishkin, J. S.; and Plane, D. L. 1999. Delib-erative polling and policy outcomes: Electric utility issuesin texas. In annual meeting of the Midwest Political ScienceAssociation, Chicago, volume 4, 1999.Twilio Blog Post. 2018. Programmable Video withTwilio Flex. https://www.twilio.com/blog/2018/03/video-chat-react.html.