Supporting Online Discussions: Integrating AI Into the adhocracy+ Participation Platform To Enhance Deliberation
This work addresses the challenge of improving discussion quality and participant interaction in large-scale online participation processes for organizers and users, representing an incremental application of AI to an existing platform.
The paper tackled the problem of unstructured and uncivil online discussions by integrating AI-supported debate modules into the adhocracy+ platform to enhance deliberation, reporting findings from a large-scale user study on their effects and usability.
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.