Supporting Online Discussions: Integrating AI Into the adhocracy+ Participation Platform To Enhance Deliberation

Abstract: Online spaces allow people to discuss important issues and make joint decisions, regardless of their location or time zone. However, without proper support and thoughtful design, these discussions often lack structure and politeness during the exchanges of opinions. AI represents an opportunity to support both participants and organizers of large-scale online participation processes. In this paper, we present an extension of adhocracy+, a large-scale open source participation platform, that provides two additional debate modules that are supported by AI to enhance the discussion quality and participant interaction.