Cartographer Featured in DemocracyNext's Deliberative Muscles & AI Paper

Cartographer is featured in Deliberative Muscles & AI, a paper by the international research and action institute DemocracyNext, as a complementary use of AI that helps participants reflect on their own views before deliberating.

The paper argues that deliberative assemblies do more than produce recommendations: they also build participants' deliberative capacities, such as self-reflection, reasoning, dialogue and collaboration. It then examines, capacity by capacity, whether AI strengthens these capacities or substitutes for them.

Cartographer is cited as an example of AI that supports self-reflection (pp. 7, 22–24). Rather than thinking on participants' behalf, it asks questions that help them put their values and uncertainties into words, so that they arrive at the deliberation knowing where they stand. The paper also describes how it has been used at residents' assemblies in Japan: after an expert presentation and before small-group discussion, each participant answers Cartographer individually, and the results are reviewed at each table before the conversation begins.

For details, see DemocracyNext's paper page (cover image: DemocracyNext). Deliberative Muscles & AI (DemocracyNext) Paper (PDF, DemocracyNext)