Speech by Crowd — Lugano's One-Off AI Experiment in Crowd-Scale Public Debate

In September 2019, the City of Lugano's public innovation unit, Lugano Living Lab, partnered with IBM Research's Haifa and Zurich labs to run the first-ever urban-scale test of Project Debater "Speech by Crowd" — an AI system that ordinarily debated at technology conferences, applied instead to open civic consultation.
Residents were invited to submit short arguments, anonymously, for or against a real local policy question: "Should we further explore the development of self-driving vehicles?" Over a few weeks, the system collected more than 2,500 individual arguments. Its natural-language pipeline clustered, scored and filtered the submissions by relevance, novelty and persuasive strength, then auto-composed two opposing speeches summarising the strongest case for and against — presented publicly on 3 September 2019 at Lugano Digital Day by IBM's Alessandro Curioni, Vice President of IBM Research Europe and Africa. The exercise found roughly seven in ten participating arguments favoured further development of autonomous vehicles.
Evidence caveat — Speech by Crowd was explicitly framed by its organisers as a first-of-its-kind pilot, and no independent evaluation, policy outcome or repeat deployment in Lugano or elsewhere has been documented since 2019. It illustrates AI-assisted mass argument-collection as a consultation format, not a sustained government service, and its participation figures were self-reported by the project team rather than independently audited.

Read the full analysis: https://www.luganolivinglab.ch/en/projects/project-debater-speech-by-crowd-lugano/