To solve the lack of empathy and mutual understanding among users in large-scale online deliberation and digital democracy platforms, CEPS will implement an enhanced version of COCTEAU. This innovative software primes empathy through gamification and employs an AI ‘critic’ to flag underrepresentation of marginalised groups during deliberations. By improving peer-to-peer interaction, testing alternative voting procedures, and pre-bunking misinformation, COCTEAU will create a more inclusive and informed environment for participants. This implementation will lead to improved interaction quality among participants, fostering a more collaborative environment that mitigates misinformation and marginalisation. Over the course of 12 months, COCTEAU will be tested in one large-scale gathering of the Democratic Odyssey project.
This grant to develop the project will allow CEPS to formalise the consortium partnership, conduct comprehensive landscape research to understand the current environment and end beneficiaries, as well as desk research into gamification and empathy in participatory forums. It will allow to build connections with relevant NGOs, start exchanging with local communities, and with partners for deliberation use cases. We will define ethical and legal requirements and plan on how to test for ethical, legal and socioeconomic impacts; carry out surveys and interviews on the impact of COCTEAU; test it in at least 1 large-scale deliberation; and conduct an ELSE (ethical, legal and socioeconomic) analysis on COCTEAU-2.0.
