Toda Peace Institute brief on deliberative tech tools and interoperability

I am excited to announce that an article I wrote evaluating different deliberative tech tools was just published as a Toda Peace Institute Policy brief! https://lnkd.in/eiUi6zjb A few keys takeaways: Stack your tools strategically: Use Talk to the City/Deliberation.io for listening, Pol.is for mapping opinions, and CrowdSmart for final decisions—each tool serves a distinct purpose in the deliberation process. We need a 'deliberation index': The field needs shared metrics beyond participation counts to measure reasoning quality, view change, and engagement depth across different platforms. Collaboration is key: Greater interoperability and universal standards will make deliberative tech more accessible and help us build governance structures that value collective decision-making. I am excited to continue experimenting and see how the deliberative tech community continues to evolve. Special thanks to Victoria Stanski, Lisa Schirch and Rosemary McBryde for their help writing and editing, and to all the students involved in the Common Good AI summer program.

The San Francisco Department of Technology (DT) celebrates the 20th anniversary of One City One Book, featuring The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a powerful story of curiosity, resilience, and the ethics of innovation. This year’s One City One Book coincides with San Francisco’s first-ever #AIWeek (Dec. 11–17, 2025), a citywide celebration of responsible, equitable, and people-centered artificial intelligence. Presented by the Department of Technology’s Emerging Technologies Division, AI Week will bring together City staff, technologists, and residents to explore how AI can strengthen public services, foster creativity, and reflect San Francisco’s values of equity, innovation, and inclusion. Join us as we read, learn, and co-create a future where technology serves everyone. 🔗 Learn more: sfpl.org/onecityonebook

We’re thrilled to share a new publication! Common Good AI’s Senior Associate, Davis Smith, conceptualized and implemented a nine-week program with 25 college volunteers.  We road-tested four deliberative tools–CrowdSmart, Pol.is, Talk to the City, Deliberation.io–to understand their functions and effectiveness, and to identify digital facilitation strategies. The policy brief ends with actionable steps to make these tools easier to use, and better for collective decision-making. -- Davis Smith #CivicTech #DeliberativeDemocracy #PublicDiscourse #AIandSociety #ProsocialDesign #DigitalDemocracy #TechForGood #PublicInterestTechnology #DeliberativeTechnology #CivicInnovation https://lnkd.in/eSXAumbs

Noticing an interesting hackathon running this month: HackAging.ai (Oct 7–25), focused on building agentic software tools for aging and longevity research. Participants are tackling problems like multi-omics data integration, age-aware trial design, and automating research pipelines for biomarker discovery. The event is remote-first, with global teams working via Discord and submitting open-source code. Total prize pool: $20,000. There are two tracks — one oriented toward infrastructure for researchers (e.g. reproducible analysis workflows), the other toward prototypes with commercial potential (e.g. tools for biotech portfolio mapping or trial planning). Projects are judged on technical execution, scientific validity, and real-world usability. For those tracking how computational methods are being applied to aging biology, this is a concrete snapshot of what people are actually trying to build — under time pressure, with mixed teams, and visible output.

New report: Permission to learn Creating the conditions for ethical experimentation in public sector technology Across Australia, public servants are finding ways to experiment with emerging technology, from AI to digital service redesign, but often without the structures that make it safe to try. This report brings together insights from over 60 public sector professionals, technologists, policy leaders, and civic designers who joined us at Civic Tech dinners in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra. Inside you’ll find: ▪️ 7 system-level shifts to de-risk experimentation ▪️ Practical steps teams can take today ▪️ Case studies from Australia and beyond ▪️ What’s working, what’s holding us back, and what comes next We hope this report helps spark safer, bolder, and more supported public sector innovation. Download your copy here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g4Ey_eXP

Open source is now on everybody's agenda and it is important that we collaborate with all you that have been in the scene for some time now. Last thursday Digital Decade Board gave it's approval to establish DC EDIC an European Digital Infrastructure Consortia on Digital Commons. The purpose is to fill the gaps for scaling open source into European digital infrastructures as part of Digital Decade goals and agenda. EDIC's are supposed to be well targeted "funding shortcut" also for businesses with a common agenda. As the DC EDIC now starts taking shape it is important to find it a well planned work plan and purpose to achieve use case and need based approach. Welcoming Voxit to join the ecosystem.

In a world where attention is currency and engagement shapes our actions, literacy is quietly losing ground with consequences for all of us. At the Future Ready: FutureSkills Conference, Michael Iafe, COO of Auris Tech (Fonetti), is leading the conversation on why rebuilding literacy is everyone’s business. As technology and AI transform how we learn and work, reading remains the foundation for every future skill. This is rapidly becoming more than a education issue, companies also have a critical stake in the future of literacy. Our next generation’s ability to learn, adapt, and innovate depends on strong reading skills. By getting involved, businesses can help drive engagement, close skills gaps, and secure long-term success. Mike will share insights from Fonetti’s National Read-Aloud Challenge and cross-sector collaborations showing how the tactics that grab digital attention can rebuild literacy, not by fighting distraction, but by learning from it. There is still time to apply for tickets: https://lnkd.in/e9GE7-sf Kim Antoniou | Fonetti

San Francisco Tech Week keeps proving why this city remains the global epicenter of technological innovation and creative experimentation. Today’s all-day hackathon at Entrepreneurs First —with a subtle Burning Man theme— was a powerful reminder that meaningful innovation happens at the intersection of technology, mindfulness, and community. The agenda itself broke conventions: it began with a tea ceremony and guided meditation, setting a deliberate tone of focus and presence before diving into a full day of building, prototyping, and iteration. These practices, far from being symbolic, are part of a growing recognition that high-performance technical work benefits from aligned mental states and authentic human connection —a kind of systems-level calibration before deep engineering cycles begin. From a technical standpoint, the event fostered interdisciplinary synergies that are essential in today’s frontier fields: generative AI, agentic systems, and product design rooted in human-computer co-creation. The projects emerging from these spaces aren’t just about building functional prototypes; they’re exploring new interfaces between human cognition and computational architectures —from LLM-driven collaboration models to early-stage autonomous agents with dynamic feedback loops. In a world where iteration speed defines competitive advantage, hackathons like this one aren’t just about hacking —they’re about redefining the architecture of innovation itself. They function as experimental labs for human-AI alignment, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when creativity, computation, and community converge. Another day at San Francisco Tech Week that reinforces a key truth: the future of technology isn’t only written in code —it’s shaped by the environments we design to think, build, and evolve together.

Who do you call when AI labels your child a criminal? “No Data About Us Without Us: An Afrofuturist Reflection on Building Grassroots Infrastructures for Digital Liberation” is an inaugural essay of the Storytelling Project series, written by Chelsea Barabas and Clarence Okoh. It examines how data-driven surveillance technologies are deepening racialized punishment in schools—and how communities are organizing for digital liberation. This essay draws on the No Data About Us Without Us Fellowship, a program of the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition from the Twin Cities Innovation Alliance and the Edgelands Institute, with the contribution of Tammie L Campbell from the Honey Brown Hope Foundation Learn more at edgelands.institute/blog

The old community playbook? It’s already obsolete. 🕰️ Declining engagement, AI reshaping discovery, and customers moving conversations into other spaces mean the old rules no longer apply. At Toronto Community Week, we’ll explore how community leaders can adapt and thrive in this new landscape. 🎤 Richard Millington, Founder of FeverBee - Community Consulting and Author of Buzzing Communities, will share the new playbook for thriving communities. Drawing from 300+ communities built for leading brands like Apple, Google, The World Bank, and many others, Richard will show how to overcome today’s challenges, rethink outdated models, and build communities that are better—not just bigger. If you want to future-proof your strategy, this is the session to bookmark. 📅 Explore the full agenda and grab your pass here: https://lnkd.in/e2HCPc9f