NetHood joined the EuComMeet consortium to develop a deliberation platform with automatic facilitation and to work on automated moderator integration and testing.
A first prototype of the EuComMeet platform developed by NetHood is up and running for the first pilots foreseen in autumn 2022.
Read below the interview with the NetHood team
What are your goals and role in the EuComMeet project?
“NetHood’s role in EuComMeet is to develop a deliberation platform with automatic facilitation modules developed by the EuComMeet partners. Our strategic choice has been to build such a platform based on existing free software, namely NextCloud and Jit.si, and integrate various automatic functionalities as separate modules. This is important for the long-term sustainability of the platform and building of a wider community around its development. Special focus has been given on design the whole process of organizing, running, and documenting citizen assemblies by non-experts.”
How such goals can be framed in the broader debate on the role of deliberative democracy?
“The EuComMeet platform explores various assumptions regarding the advantages and disadvantages online deliberations compared to physical assemblies and adds one more significant research questions regarding the effects of supervised moderation on the quality of deliberation.
During EuComMeet live debates will take place on a customized instance of Jit.si for which a facilitation chatbot is being developed. The chatbot should indeed facilitate the interaction and debate between participants, it will carry out agenda management tasks, abuse prevention and wait list management. In this manner EuComMeet will explore the impact of supervised moderation, where most of the facilitation will be entrusted to the chatbot and a human moderator is requested to intervene (by the chatbot itself) only for those cases where the chatbot can not solve the situation.
The modularity of the platform and the careful documentation will allow for extensive experimentation beyond the project’s pilots, and the creation of a global community of practice around key research questions on the effect of automation on the quality of the deliberations supported.
The code and the documentation will be disclosed publicly only at the end of the project, under open and free licenses. At this stage, a first prototype of the EuComMeet platform is up and running at https://nextcloud.eucommeet.eu and a detailed process has been designed and documented for the first pilots foreseen in autumn 2022.”
NetHood team