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Citizen Infrastructure

Decide & make sense together

Some of the hardest, most valuable things a community does are deciding together and making sense of many voices at once. These tools help groups deliberate, surface common ground, and turn a sprawling conversation into something everyone can understand.

A new wave of them uses AI to do this at a scale that used to be impossible. A few that stand out:

  • Thinkscape (Unanimous AI) — splits a large group into many small “ThinkTank” conversations and uses AI agents to weave them into one coherent deliberation, so even very big groups can talk in real time without losing the depth of a small room.
  • Urbanist AI — lets residents reimagine their own street or neighbourhood using image-generation AI: take a photo, picture a greener or better version, draw on it together. A natural fit for participatory budgeting and placemaking.
  • Assembl (bluenove) — a “massive collective intelligence” platform that distils wide-ranging debates into legible, creative formats — mind maps, videos, even comic-strip summaries — so people can actually see what a deliberation produced.

Alongside the AI-native tools, two established platforms are workhorses of online group decision-making:

  • Loomio — a decision-making platform for groups and organisations to discuss, propose, and decide together asynchronously, leaving a clear record they can point back to. Built by a worker co-op.
  • Decidim — a major free, open-source platform for citizen participation, born in Barcelona and now used by cities and organisations worldwide for consultations, participatory budgeting, and more. It powers Brasil Participativo, the Brazilian federal government’s participation platform, which had reached roughly 1.4 million users by 2024 — a sign these tools can work at national scale. Its annual DecidimFest gathers the global community around use cases beyond cities and the role of AI in participation.
  • Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab) — a community-engagement platform that helps local governments gather and make sense of resident input, increasingly with AI assistance. A widely used commercial option in Europe and beyond. Its practitioner webinars document real deployments — Copenhagen engaging 12,000 residents in four months, participatory budgeting in St Louis, comprehensive-plan engagement in Allen, Texas — and methods-mix and engagement-culture playbooks.
  • Make.org — a European participatory-democracy platform that runs large-scale public consultations and surfaces where many thousands of people actually agree.
  • Polis — an open-source tool that maps where a large group agrees and disagrees: people vote agree / disagree / pass on short statements (no reply button, so no pile-ons), and it surfaces the statements that win support across opinion clusters — the uncommon ground. The engine behind vTaiwan, and the forerunner of the Community Notes bridging algorithm now used by YouTube, Meta and X.
  • Cortico — a non-profit (from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication) behind the Local Voices Network. Its “talk, understand, share” method records small-group, story-based conversations and uses AI to surface themes into voice medleys and conversation maps — see civic listening.
  • Remesh — an AI-assisted platform that lets a large group “talk” by reacting to each other’s statements in real time, revealing where opinion converges — used to help find common ground even in tense settings.
  • Harmonica — an AI facilitator for group sensemaking: it holds a structured one-to-one conversation with each participant (on the web or via Telegram), then synthesises everyone’s input into a shared summary. Designed to augment human facilitators rather than replace them; open-core, with a public open-source edition, optional anonymity, and bring-your-own-model support. Suited to brainstorms, retrospectives, and consultations that can’t fit everyone in one live room.

To understand what these tools can and can’t do, see AI for participation and Can AI scale deliberation?. To see them settling real decisions, see vTaiwan and the AI-facilitated Taiwan Alignment Assemblies.

More tools will be added here over time. Know one that belongs? Use the “Edit page” link below.