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.”

The author explores the vulnerabilities in our democratic system that AI will affect. He advocates for “protected democratic deliberation,” akin to citizen assemblies, as a strategy to safeguard democracy in an AI-empowered world.

Welcome to our second newsletter.  Since our launch last month, we received positive feedback from many of you–thank you! In this newsletter, we highlight how we are building momentum around the idea of using collective intelligence to enable democratic engagement. Below, you will find several highlights from our ongoing outreach.

The Common Good AI story started at a meeting at MIT Media Lab, orchestrated by John Clippinger in March 2023. We had a shared vision of AI that looked beyond the current fascination with large language models. We gathered a group that included John Cordier, CEO of Epistemix, and Kim Polese (a co-founder of CrowdSmart).

As a new nonprofit organization, we are fuelled by the opportunity to advance effective grassroots democratic engagement by leveraging the power of human collective intelligence at scale. Using new forms of AI that facilitate collaborative dialogue and reasoning, people everywhere can now engage in productive conversations about the issues that matter to them, learn from each other, and collectively prioritize solutions together. 

We are launching this monthly newsletter to share updates about our initiatives, and we invite you to engage with us.

The capacity of groups to solve problems rests on finding common ground. At the moment, our nation and our world struggle. It is a struggle between building and preserving identity (be it national, political party, corporate, or individual) and the capacity to form bridges of understanding and knowledge discovery.

On July 4th, I took a long, four-and-one-half-hour, thoughtful walk. I am fortunate to live in a coastal community that celebrates July 4th simply and authentically. Farmer John drives his tractor down the main street. His father-in-law, a veteran of World War II, was interviewed in front of city hall, next to the famous Half Moon Bay "Sit Down the marching band." Some are older, and this year, the band seemed smaller.

In my walk, I absorbed the diversity of our community.

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Not all AI is democracy ending AI. Some can support democracy and make it better. In this episode, I talk to Kim Polese, whose career launching transformative technologies (beginning with Java) has landed with a democracy enhancing AI, CrowdSmart. We talk about its potential, as well as the open source alternative, pol.is.