Blog by Beth Noveck: “Officials in Hamburg had long struggled with the fact that while citizens submitted thousands of comments on planning projects, only a fraction could realistically be read and processed. Making sense of feedback from a single engagement could once occupy five full-time employees for more than a week and chill any desire to do a follow-up conversation. Learn about how Hamburg built its own open source artificial intelligence to make sense of citizen feedback on a scale and speed that was once unimaginable…The Digital Participation System (DIPAS) is Hamburg, Germany’s integrated digital participation platform, designed to let residents contribute ideas, comments, and feedback on urban development projects online or in workshops. It combines mapping, document sharing, and discussion tools so that citizens can engage directly with concrete plans for their neighborhoods.
City officials had long struggled with the fact that while citizens submitted thousands of comments on planning projects, only a fraction could realistically be read and processed.
“We take the promise of participation seriously,” explained Claudius Lieven, one of DIPAS’s creators in Hamburg’s Ministry of Urban Development and Housing. “If people contribute, their collective intelligence must count. But with so many inputs, we simply couldn’t keep up.”
Making sense of feedback from a single engagement could once occupy five full-time employees for more than a week and chill any desire to do a follow-up conversation.
As a result, Lieven and his team spent three years integrating AI into the open-source system to make the new analytics toolbox more useful and the government more responsive. They combined the fine-tuning of Facebook’s advanced open-source language models LLaMA and RoBERTa with topic modeling and geodata integration.
With AI, DIPAS can cluster and summarize thousands of comments and distinguish between a “major position” about the current situation (for example, “The bike path is unsafe”) and an “idea” proposing what should be done (“The bike path should have better lighting”)…(More)”.
