News

In September, we observed Otoineppu Village Council meetings and compared our notes with the materials distributed. We worked to keep what was discussed separate from the questions we ourselves had.

In August, we worked with a filmmaking collaborator to prepare for interviews in Otoineppu in September.

Following the resident meeting held in May, we spent June examining Otoineppu’s experience with public participation and the council’s published materials.

At the "Workshop on Interoperability in Deliberative Tooling: Asia Regional," held in Tokyo from July 29 to 31, 2026, our representative Shunsuke Takagi presented Cartographer, our consensus-building tool.

Cartographer, our consensus-building tool, has been selected for the Mozilla Foundation's "Democracy x AI" incubator cohort.

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.

Makoto Maeda, a leading expert in citizen-participatory consensus building for local governments, has been appointed as an advisor to Plural Reality.

The final part of our dialogue series with KOSO NIPPON, a Japanese policy think tank, has been published. It discusses rethinking concepts such as mini-publics and representative democracy from first principles, and the role of physical presence in the age of AI.

We have transitioned to a new organizational structure to clarify management decision-making and strengthen R&D and business operations as independent pillars.

Part 2 of our dialogue series with KOSO NIPPON, a Japanese policy think tank, has been published. It discusses how the concrete experiences of everyday life can be translated into policy language that government and politics can work with.

KOSO NIPPON, a Japanese policy think tank, has started a three-part dialogue series with Plural Reality on its note blog. Part 1 discusses how today's democratic systems compress a hundred different views into a choice between A and B, and how technology can move beyond this.

Part 4 of The Asahi Shimbun's series on desire and politics, published in the morning edition on 6 January 2026, covered the use of Cartographer at the Residents Council in Ota City, Gunma.