deliberAIde — AI-Assisted Participatory Planning Conferences in Siegen-Wittgenstein

Kreis Siegen-Wittgenstein, a district of about 270,000 residents in North Rhine-Westphalia where 71% of the land is forested, runs annual "Sozialplanungskonferenzen" (participatory social-planning conferences) to gather residents' priorities for local social policy. In 2024 the district piloted deliberAIde, an AI platform built by an independent civic-tech team, as its second iteration after a 2023 pilot.

During ten conferences held across ten of the district's eleven municipalities, with 30 to 90 attendees each, deliberAIde was used at 10-12 discussion tables to transcribe speech in real time with automatic anonymisation, cluster similar ideas and themes, tag and categorise contributions, and generate summary reports and visual "digital sticky notes" of each table's discussion. The platform uses large language models and image-generation models for summarisation, visualisation and analysis, while human moderators remained central to facilitation — the AI's stated purpose was to free moderators to focus on dialogue quality rather than note-taking, turning documentation that previously took days into work completed in minutes.

Two citizen-driven proposals from the 2024 conferences advanced to local politicians: a multi-channel AI platform to improve access to social support services, and a "third places" framework for rural childcare and intergenerational meeting spaces. The pilot ran at no direct cost to the district, which served as an alpha-phase testing partner; the University of Siegen supported evaluation of the social-support platform proposal, and the pilot was backed by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation's Global Innovation Hub in Taipei.