A Use Case for Digital Peace Talks

Digital Peace Talks (DPT) is a social enterprise. This is how we intend to market our free and open source software.

While there will always be a free and open DPT instance for everybody to join and discuss topics, our main focus will be on supporting municipalities with an open and safe platform for discourse.

Neither commercial platforms like Twitter and Facebook, nor open source tools like discourse.org offer these actors non-normative ways to deal with uncivil behaviors.

Apart from the obvious trade-off between either little data privacy and enormous reach or high data privacy and low reach, both kind of platforms handle incivility with flagging, deleting and banning. Yet experts pointed out and reality proved that this causes extreme users to migrate to less-regulated platforms. We think there is a way uphold social and democratic norms without excluding those that (unwillingly?) violate them.

DPT keeps uncivil users at check, without using force.

Let’s say a local youth organisation in the medium sized German city of Germersheim wants free public WiFi. When they receive our mailing, offering a tool, support and guidance to host a open and safe public discourse, they are interested and fill out our contact form.

We reach out and offer to conduct an on-site workshop in which we work out a press and public relation strategy with them, to ensure the citizens know about the online discourse and how to use it. There will be three options for financing the workshop and travel expenses:

• the local partner has sufficient funds
• the local partner applies for fund, with a template and a list of potential funding sources from us
• we applied and received funding to conduct such workshops

After the workshop, because they have a few hackers in their team, they set up a DPT instance on their own server for free. They could have also used our one-click hosting solution for a nominal fee. They send a press release composed in the workshop to the local newspaper, hang out posters, send an invitation to the county council and and set up a Wordpress blog. We supply them with designs, tutorial videos, step-by-step instructions and FAQ. They decide which topics they want to put up for discussion. In their case it is topics relating to smart city development, they are after free public WiFi after all.

The local partner can set up a free instance on their own or use our hosting solution.

When the website goes live, Citizens post their opinions regarding the chosen topics and request one-on-one chats with each other, indicating how they feel about the other’s opinion (e.g. “Opinion A wants to chat with you because the user feels [curious/sceptical/angry/inspired] about your opinion. Do you accept?”). During the chat they secretly click on buttons indicating the qualities of their chat. (e.g. right now our chat is [friendly/angry], [inspiring/uninspiring]).

The chats are visualised as a 3D network model. A positive feedback in a chat draws both opinions closer together and negative feedback places both opinions further apart (a clustered signed graph). The effect:

• (extreme) opinions with lots of negative feedback (regardless of whom received or gave it) are pushed to the very fringe
• opinions with no chats are put on a pile
• closed groups rating themselves up are exposed as such.

The only way for an opinion to get high visibility in DPT is to have natural and diverse chats.

To ensure full transparency chats messages get released after a one week threshold.

Example:
chat messages sent on day 1 get released on day 8
chat messages sent on day 2 gets released on day

As the members of the youth organisation get engaged in dialogues, they learn about concerns regarding their wish for free public WiFi, but also find out about unidentified advantages and implementation knowledge. After six weeks they use the DPT analysis dashboard and a template to release a report, which describes the most prominent opinion groups. The local newspaper picks up and fact checks the report also using the dashboard.

The public deliberation process is followed by a petition.

They start a petition ,using an established provider like change.org or openpetition.de, that considers prominent concerns and includes implementation details as well as a long list of potential public benefits. Due to the open and transparent public deliberation process the petition becomes a full success. Germersheim gets free public WiFi!

The youth organisation decides to keep the DPT instance to discuss more topics. After a period of one year they host a discourse to evaluate success and propose adjustments of their WiFi project.

Many thanks go out to Jan Wilk, who inspired the use case and supported DPT since the beginning!