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Good practice Imported

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

Switzerland · Lugano · See the Switzerland profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 94% 27/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

In 2019, Lugano's public innovation lab and IBM Research ran a one-off AI experiment collecting 2,500+ citizen arguments on self-driving vehicles and auto-generating opposing speeches — a striking pilot with no independent evaluation or repeat use documented since.

2,500+
Arguments collected (2019)
~70%
Arguments favouring further AV development (2019)

Details

Maturity
Discontinued
Promoter
Lugano Living Lab (City of Lugano) & IBM Research
Period
2019
Region (NUTS)
CH07
Keywords
citizen participation, deliberative democracy, natural language processing, civic consultation

Context

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 urban-scale test of Project Debater 'Speech by Crowd', applying an AI debate system to open civic consultation.

Activities

Residents submitted short arguments, anonymously, for or against the question 'Should we further explore the development of self-driving vehicles?'. The system's natural-language pipeline clustered, scored and filtered submissions by relevance, novelty and persuasive strength, then auto-composed two opposing summary speeches.

Results

Over a few weeks the system collected more than 2,500 individual arguments; roughly seven in ten participating arguments favoured further development of autonomous vehicles. Results were presented publicly on 3 September 2019 at Lugano Digital Day.

Conclusions

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; its participation figures were self-reported by the project team rather than independently audited.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — Cost not disclosed; delivered as a research collaboration with IBM Research.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Single event, September 2019; no repeat since.
Staffing & skills
Lugano Living Lab (City of Lugano), IBM Research (Haifa and Zurich labs)

Conditions for success

  • anonymous submission to encourage candid participation
  • NLP pipeline capable of clustering and scoring thousands of short arguments within weeks

Common failure modes

  • no repeat deployment or independent evaluation since 2019 -- illustrates a consultation format demonstrated once, not a sustained government service

Where it fits

Governance type
municipal innovation lab with corporate research partner
Scale
single city (Lugano)
Income level
high income (Switzerland)

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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