Related papers: Online Assemblies: Civic Technologies Reshaping th…
Over the last years, civic technology projects have emerged around the world to advance open government and community action. Although Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities have shown a…
Advanced AI systems capable of generating humanlike text and multimodal content are now widely available. In this paper, we discuss the impacts that generative artificial intelligence may have on democratic processes. We consider the…
Deliberative democracy arguably leads to better collective decisions, but is fundamentally constrained by human attention and bandwidth. While recent AI-mediated deliberations scale participation by synthesizing inputs from many humans,…
Urban digital twins are increasingly perceived as a way to pool the growing digital resources of cities for the purpose of a more sustainable and integrated urban planning. Models and simulations are central to this undertaking: They enable…
Online platforms provide an infrastructure for social movements, leaving digital traces that can be modelled as networks to quantify how information, participation, and coordination emerge during episodes of collective action and evolve…
Over the last decades, the Internet and mobile technology have consolidated the digital as a public sphere of life. Designers are asked to create engaging digital experiences. However, in some cases engagement is seen as a psychological…
As testified by new regulations like the European AI act, the worries about the societal impact of (autonomous) software technologies are becoming of public concern. Social and human values, besides the traditional software behaviour and…
New computer-mediated channels of communication are action oriented and have the ability to deliver information and dialogue - moderated and unmoderated - which can facilitate the bringing together of a series of society's stakeholders,…
Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved…
Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of…
Understanding online communities requires an appreciation of both structure and culture. But basic questions remain difficult to pose. How do these facets interact and drive each other? Using data on the membership and governance styles of…
Our cultural discourse is increasingly carried in the web. With the initial emergence of the web many years ago, there was a period where conventional mediums (e.g., music, movies, books, scholarly publications) were primary and the web was…
Many celebrate the Internet's ability to connect individuals and facilitate collective action toward a common goal. While numerous systems have been designed to support particular aspects of collective action, few systems support…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
With the wide adoption of the multi-community setting in many popular social media platforms, the increasing user engagements across multiple online communities warrant research attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel analogy between…
In an increasingly polarized world, demagogues who reduce complexity down to simple arguments based on emotion are gaining in popularity. Are opinions and online discussions falling into demagoguery? In this work, we aim to provide…
Community engagement processes form a critical foundation of democratic governance, yet frequently struggle with resource constraints, sensemaking challenges, and barriers to inclusive participation. These processes rely on constructive…
Interactions between users in cyberspace may lead to phenomena different from those observed in common social networks. Here we analyse large data sets about users and Blogs which they write and comment, mapped onto a bipartite graph. In…
Oxford-style debating is a well-known tool in social sciences. Such formal discussions on particular topics are widely used by historians and sociologists. However, when we try to go beyond standard thinking, it turns out that Oxford-style…