Published by the Toda Peace Institute October 30, 2025, this article outlines the experience of testing four of these tools—Crowdsmart, Pol.is, Talk to the City, and Deliberation.io—with a group of student volunteers to understand their function and effectiveness, and to identify digital facilitation strategies. The paper concludes with recommendations to make deliberative tools more accessible in the future to enable collective decision-making.

This issue spotlights our learning sprint testing and documenting digital tools for better civic dialogue by sharing two new publications. Also, we hit a major milestone: Common Good AI now has independent 501(c)(3) status.

As part of the monthly Deliberative Tech Hub meetings hosted by the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion, Thomas Kehler and Victoria Stanski from Common Good AI introduced the organization, its deliberative design process, and provided a demo of CrowdSmart, one of the deliberative platforms used to support community problem-solving.

This session covered the research agenda of the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion’s deliberative technology hub, lessons learned to date, emerging frameworks, and the direction of the deliberative field. Victoria Stanski from Common Good AI gave a 15-minute demo of the CrowdSmart deliberative platform.

This issue highlights a growing global shift toward technology that strengthens democracy, fosters social cohesion, and centers public voice in shaping a more just, inclusive future.

This issue explores democratic futurism through AI—highlighting tools, stories, and frameworks for building more inclusive, human-centred digital futures.

We highlight the value of human-centered technology to solve problems and design the future. Technology is not as a replacement for human insight, but as a facilitator for deeper understanding and engagement.

The primary goal of this digital collaboration was to enable the nonprofit organization to efficiently review and ideate strategies to simplify and streamline their internal performance management business processes. It demonstrates how AI can enhance—not replace—human insight by surfacing shared perspectives within a nonprofit team, shifting their mindset from individual frustration to collective problem solving—and help democratize organizational decision-making.

We highlight the importance of dialogue, featuring the National Week of Conversation, insights on creating safe digital spaces, and discussions on technologies that foster mutual understanding.

The global backslide of democracy is evident, but people are still mobilizing, organizing, and winning—how can digital tools enable greater community engagement?

We dedicate this newsletter to the concept of pluralism — the idea that multiple distinct groups, beliefs, cultures, or values can coexist within a community. At its core, pluralism enshrines diversity of ideas because it enables social and political systems to thrive because they must collaborate to coexist. 

At its heart, democracy is about collective decision making. It is a way to solve common problems together and foster trust. Citizen Assemblies — used by governments and nonprofit organizations worldwide — are one way to promote democracy by increasing public engagement in government decisions.

This year will always remain firm in our memory. It was the year we took a bold leap to start this new non-profit organization: Common Good AI. The last 12 months have shown the power of navigating challenges together, as we used adaptive thinking to guide our way. We established Common Good AI because we see tremendous opportunities to foster community-based problem solving using digital collaboration at scale. As we look across 2024 and now forward to 2025, we are further emboldened that our vision to use new tools to promote inclusive civic engagement can happen if we continue to adapt and solve problems together. 

A group of thinkers in the Sustainable Development Goals Thought Leaders Circle (SDG TLC)  were inspired by United Nations’ (UN) General-Secretary António Guterres’ call for “deep and rapid transformation.” The group wanted to leverage the UN and its member states’ openness to new ways of working to propose radically new approaches. They used CrowdSmart and one facilitator commented, “The technology lets participants observe the universe from a different place, to see what's happening in the world from a different perspective.”

Common Good AI uses CrowdSmart.ai as a tool to promote civic engagement. The CrowdSmart.ai system was originally developed to evaluate the efficacy of business startups, so let's use that as an example to explain the architecture. 

We continue to receive messages from readers, who are enthusiastic about community-based problem solving using digital collaboration at scale. We’ve connected with a wide range of individuals, from strategists designing inclusive global governance systems to grassroots organizers hosting citizen dialogues to mitigate US polarization. It validates the need for new tools to promote inclusive civic engagement to find an actionable path forward together.

Village Media is a leader in community-based journalism who reach five million subscribers in over 150 small communities across North America. They collaborate with local news outlets to generate successful business approaches and high integrity journalistic content to build  profitable and sustainable local news sites. They are dedicated to making community news sustainable in markets of any size through a combination of industry-leading technology, community-based marketing programs, and award-winning editorial. 

As we learn and grow as an organization, we return to early collaborations to identify success factors and continue to improve our processes. This early case study is not a rigorous academic study, rather documentation of lessons learned based on key informant interviews.  When asked about how CrowdSmart helped bring participants to agreement around root causes, Dr. Garcia said, “this changed their minds… the term that comes to mind is empathy.”