ABSTRACT
Famously located at the head of the Great Belt Bridge, Slagelse municipality aims to create another linking element – a knowledge bridge to its citizens – by including their collective intelligence in local policymaking. For this purpose, the municipality designed an online deliberation platform together with the Collective Intelligence Research Group at the IT University of Copenhagen and in collaboration with CitizenLab in Brussels. The knowledge-based platform is a deliberation forum integrating artificial intelligence/natural language processing (NLP) mechanisms to sort and categorize citizen insights, making engagement of a larger number of citizens possible. On the website “Our Knowledge,” the municipality aims to continuously involve citizens to capture their ideas and inputs, thus helping citizens to create better solutions. For example, it could be questions concerning biodiversity, the climate crisis, or public health. The preliminary findings of the research project show the potential of combining collective intelligence and artificial intelligence as well as barriers to overcome.
