On Wednesday, March 13th from 12-5pm ET, please join the Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice—led by the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), Search for Common Ground, the Toda Peace Institute, and Mercy Corps—and the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion for a hybrid digital peacebuilding expo. The event will promote exchange and networking between digital peacebuilding practitioners, as well as explore the opportunities and challenges of digital peacebuilding approaches, by featuring a series of interactive, practical demonstrations and presentations of digital peacebuilding tools. The expo will include practical creative use cases of AI-powered large-language models (LLMs), chatbots, and deliberative technologies designed to advance peacebuilding and conflict prevention online and offline.
Watch the recordings below!
Agenda:
12-12:15pm: Welcome Remarks from the Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice and Council on Technology and Social Cohesion Leadership
Lena Slachmuijlder, Executive Director, Digital Peacebuilding, Search for Common Ground; Co-Chair, Council on Technology and Social Cohesion
Nick Zuroski, Manager, Policy and Advocacy, Alliance for Peacebuilding; Coordinator, Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice
12:15-2pm: Demo Series: LLMs and Chatbots for Peace
Demo #1: Depolarizing GPT
During this session, Steve McIntosh, Cofounder of the Institute for Cultural Education and Director of the Developmental Politics Project, will provide a real-time demo of his DepolarizingGPT—a political AI chatbot that gives three answers to every prompt: one from a left-wing perspective, one from a right-wing perspective, and a third answer from a depolarizing or "integrating" perspective. The demo will explore how the model can help reduce political and cultural polarization by integrating and synthesizing responsible views from the political left and right, ultimately helping users in the American public broaden their understanding of others across the political spectrum.
Demo #2: BridgeBot
This session, led by Lena Slachmuijlder, Executive Director for Digital Peacebuilding at Search for Common Ground, will discuss how Search for Common Ground, in partnership with TangibleAI, built BridgeBot: a WhatsApp-based chatbot to shift perspectives and grow skills in dealing with online conflict. BridgeBot acts as a companion to social media users, helping them deal with differences of opinions—including everyday cultural and political differences—by building skills on empathy, identity, and nonviolent communication. Informed by Search for Common Ground’s Common Ground Approach, BridgeBot has been used more than 1,000 times in English, French, and Arabic since May 2023.
Demo #3: The Acquaint Platform
This session will discuss how the Acquaint platform is using LLMs to build intercultural understanding and collaboration skills to combat prejudice and hate, spread empathy and understanding, and create collective action for positive impact around the world. Katherine Mahon, Co-Founder and CEO of Acquaint, and Alex Szebenyi, Co-Founder and CTO, will explain how the platform is equipping “volunteers”—users of the platform who engage in one-on-one conversations with each other—with these skills that they can bring back to their local communities and organizations. Acquaint volunteers can interactively practice skills like using “I-statements," posing open-ended questions that promote active listening, and navigating topics of disagreement, all while receiving feedback from chatbots trained on these principles. The Acquaint team will explain how these trainings enhance intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding, as well as some of the challenges and best practices that emerged as Acquaint deployed these tools for audiences in more than 100 countries.
Demo #4: Automatic Classifiers for Peace
During this session, Caleb Gichuhi, Africa lead for Build Up, will provide an overview of Build Up’s Automatic Classifications for Peace (ACfP) group, which aims to further the development of open-source text classification systems for peacebuilding and mediation, as well as widen and deepen the number of organizations involved in open-source text classification systems for peacebuilding. The session will feature a real time demo of a hate-speech and dangerous speech dashboard from Nigeria, developed by the group and local partners, to inform digital peacebuilding in the country.
2-2:15pm: Coffee and Networking Break
2:15-4pm: Demo Series: Deliberative Technologies Advancing Peacebuilding
Demo #1: Artificial Intelligence and Peacemaking in Sudan
This session will share findings from CMI – Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation’s work conducting digital dialogues in July 2023 using the AI-powered platform, Remesh, to support civil society’s role in an inclusive peace process in Sudan. The dialogues aimed to assess new priorities and views on representation ahead of a future inclusive political process in Sudan. Sylvia Thompson, Senior Manager at CMI, and Aino Piirtola, Project Officer, will outline best practices learned, challenges putting the tool into practice, and considerations for use at the local level beyond Sudan in other conflict-affected and fragile states.
Demo #2: The Guide to Digital Participation Platforms
This session will explore the Civic Tech Field Guide, the world’s largest collection of projects using technology for common good, to explore key insights of what works for digital participation platforms through the Guide to Digital Participation Platforms. Matt Stempeck, Founder of the Guide, will provide an overview of promising approaches to designing and running digital platforms that facilitate deliberative processes and the most common challenges facing these efforts, while providing examples of key digital participation platforms from the matrix assembled by the Guide. The discussion will also delve into promising or concerning trends—both present and in the future—around digital platforms that support deliberative processes, and implications for digital peacebuilders moving forward.
Demo #3: Talk to the City
This session will provide an overview of summarization models help communities understand the views, needs, and priorities of their members. The discussion will center on the AI Objectives Institute’s Talk to the City interface, which improves collective deliberation and decision-making by analyzing detailed, qualitative data of human opinions and preparing summaries, visualizations, and reports. The interface processes a variety of data types and uses AI to extract key arguments, arranging similar arguments into clusters and subclusters. Brittney Gallagher, Co-Founder of the AI Objectives Institute, and Deger Turan, President, will walk through the Heal Michigan report—which analyzed video interviews of challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals in Michigan—as a case study of the interface’s application. The session will also explore how the interface can be applied in future peacebuilding projects at the community level.
Demo #4: The Hotline for Israel-Palestine
The ongoing crisis in Israel-Palestine has led to unprecedented violence and humanitarian suffering, as well as contributed to societal tensions, antisemitism, and Islamophobia around the world. This session will spotlight the work of the Hotline for Israel-Palestine, a texting hotline that provides educational resources from many perspectives and answers questions around the conflict in Israel-Palestine, so that people can develop their own informed and nuanced positions. The hotline has grown into a network of more than 30 volunteers from different political, religious, and national background. Shira Hoffer, a Harvard student who founded the hotline, will share stories of the hotline’s contributions to advancing dialogue, challenges faced, and how its impacts can be scaled.