Tools
Here is a sampling of the digital tools that Common Good AI uses. While selecting the right tools is important, meaningful participation is what ultimately determines success. That requires a clearly defined objective, a communications plan aligned to that objective, specific actions you want participants to take, and well-articulated next steps.
Primary design questions include:
What opportunity or challenge are you trying to address?
Who are you seeking to engage—and why?
What level of technology access and digital literacy can be assumed among participants?
What is the best way to engage your audience? Will you need to recruit participants?
| What are you looking to do? | Tool that could help | Output from engagement |
|---|---|---|
| Map the opinion landscape | Polis and Agora Citizen | Map of opinions and ideas based on reactions to each others ideas |
| Facilitate group decision-making by identifying shared values and tradeoffs | Ethelo | Identify consensus and areas with greatest support |
| Review options to inform decision-making, predict most viable | CrowdSmart | Ranked list of priorities based on participants input |
| Analyze unstructured transcripts/conversation | Talk to the City | Report that summarizes key themes and areas of agreement/disagreement |
| Rapid, text based opened ended survey or chatbot | Twilio | Accelerated data gathering to identify priorities |
| Modular series of tools including surveys, ideation, voting or a participatory budgeting process | Go Vocal | Varies by module, a one stop shop for basic participation tools |
*This list is based on our ongoing projects, as well as informed by research done by Lisa Schirch at Notre Dame University.
Lisa’s handbook Page 28: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ynNnZ_DwugIKygeNjxRDmlANBF5drYRaS2nwmVnv1us/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.es7cg6xpiihu