Navigating New Tech for Public Deliberation in Polarized Contexts

Navigating New Tech for Public Deliberation in Polarized Contexts

21-23 November 2025

Barcelona, Spain

Deliberative technology offers digital tools for supporting public discussion on policy issues, emphasizing citizen participation and collective intelligence. There are nearly 200 such platforms to support civic engagement on pressing policy challenges. Yet government and civil society uptake of these new platforms is low, especially for deliberative technologies. The use of these platforms requires sociotechnical expertise including 1) designing and facilitating deliberative processes; and 2) choosing between different platforms for different elements of the process. Lack of awareness and understanding of the tools makes it difficult for organizations to choose the right tools and design deliberative processes.

Learning Objectives

▪ Identifying best practices of designing deliberative processes

▪ Determining how process design shifts in highly polarized contexts

▪ Recognizing the design features of deliberative technologies, and their diverse contributions to deliberative processes

▪ Choosing the right tech tools for the different stages of deliberative processes

The Toda Peace Institute is organizing a side workshop during the Build Peace Conference in Barcelona in November 2025. This side workshop will include 30 experts and practitioners who will focus on developing a jointly written and open handbook and LLM for civil society to improve, navigate, and amplify the use of deliberative technologies in their work to support peacebuilding, dialogue, movements, and governance in highly polarized contexts.

The Toda Peace Institute is an independent, nonpartisan institute committed to advancing a more just and peaceful world through policy-oriented peace research and practice. Dr. Lisa Schirch from the University of Notre Dame's Peacetech and Polarization Lab directs the "Technology and Peacebuilding" workstream for the Toda Peace Institute.

_{Image: Generated by Midjourney AI}