Related papers: Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Ach…

Trust and confidence in democratic institutions is at an all-time low. At the same time, many of the complex issues faced by city administrators and politicians remain unresolved. To tackle these concerns, many argue that citizens should,…

Participatory design in digital civics aims to foster mutual learning and co-creation between public services and citizens. However, rarely do we collectively explore the challenges and failures we experience within PD and digital civics,…

Understanding citizens' values in participatory systems is crucial for citizen-centric policy-making. We envision a hybrid participatory system where participants make choices and provide motivations for those choices, and AI agents…

Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…

Crowdsensing, also known as participatory sensing, is a method of data collection that involves gathering information from a large number of common people (or individuals), often using mobile devices or other personal technologies. This…

Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where…

We consider the participatory budgeting problem where each of $n$ voters specifies additive utilities over $m$ candidate projects with given sizes, and the goal is to choose a subset of projects (i.e., a committee) with total size at most…

Calls for heightened consideration of fairness and accountability in algorithmically-informed public decisions---like taxation, justice, and child protection---are now commonplace. How might designers support such human values? We…

With the art and practice of government policy-making, public work, and citizen participation, many governments adopt information and communication technologies (ICT) as a vehicle to facilitate their relationship with citizens. This…

Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…

The major finding, of this article, is an ensemble method, but more exactly, a novel, better ranked voting system (and other variations of it), that aims to solve the problem of finding the best candidate to represent the voters. We have…

Artificial intelligence has become a part of the provision of governmental services, from making decisions about benefits to issuing fines for parking violations. However, AI systems rarely live up to the promise of neutral optimisation,…

Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…

Democratic processes increasingly aim to integrate large-scale voting with face-to-face deliberation, addressing the challenge of reconciling individual preferences with collective decision-making. This work introduces new methods that use…

With the ubiquity of Internet technologies and growing demands for transparency and open data policies, the role of social networking and online deliberation tools for public engagement in decision-making has increased substantially in the…

Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…

During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…

This research examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve participatory budgeting processes within smart cities. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and resource allocation conflicts, the study explores…

Recent years have seen an increase in the use of online deliberation platforms (DPs). One of the main objectives of DPs is to enhance democratic participation, by allowing citizens to post, comment, and vote on policy proposals. But in what…

Ensuring ballot secrecy is critical for fair and trustworthy electronic voting systems, yet achieving strong secrecy guarantees in decentralized, large-scale elections remains challenging. This paper proposes the concept of collectively…