This AI-assisted literature review examines the current state of research on the role of facilitation in group sensemaking within deliberative processes. By analyzing key findings from the selected articles, this post aims to provide an overview of prevailing concepts, theories, and patterns of (AI-assisted) group facilitation, while also highlighting the debates, limitations, and areas for future research. It's a living document, to be updated every time I discover another relevant paper, as of March 2024 it's based on the following:

• Facilitators: The Micropolitics of Public Participation and Deliberation (Escobar, 2019)
• Fine-tuning language models to find agreement among humans with diverse preferences (Bakker et al., 2022)
• ‘Generative CI’ through Collective Response Systems (Ovadya, 2023)
• Diversity in Facilitation: Mapping Differences in Deliberative Designs (von Schneidemesser et al., 2023)
• Opportunities and Risks of LLMs for Scalable Deliberation with Polis (Small et al., 2023)
• Conversational Swarm Intelligence Enhances Groupwise Deliberation (Rosenberg et al., 2023) + CSI Enables Rapid Group Insights (Rosenberg et al., 2023) + CSI amplifies the accuracy of networked groupwise deliberations (Rosenberg et al., 2023)
• Leveraging AI for democratic discourse: Chat interventions can improve online political conversations at scale (Argyle et al., 2023)
• Towards Collective Superintelligence, a Pilot Study (Rosenberg et al., 2023) + Amplifying Group IQ using Conversational Swarms (Rosenberg et al., 2023)
• Democratic Policy Development using Collective Dialogues and AI (Konya et al., 2023)
• Deliberative Technology for Alignment (Konya et al., 2023)
• Assuming Consensus: How socio-technical assumptions are influencing decision-making in the age of ML (Hanna Barakat and Camille Canon, 2024)

Facilitators: The micropolitics of public participation and deliberation (December 2019)

Oliver Escobar

Oliver Escobar's chapter of the Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance sheds light on the often invisible but crucial role of facilitators in democratic innovations. Escobar portrays facilitators as a diverse community of practice, ranging from community organizers to discursive stewards, who enable inclusive and productive conversations in participatory processes.

Through their frontstage practices, facilitators shape the communication dynamics in forums, balancing structure and flow. They maintain impartiality on the topic while actively intervening to foster deliberative standards. For example, they might use storytelling to make the discussion more accessible or summarize key points to keep the conversation on track. However, they also face challenges, such as accommodating differences in communication styles and preventing the exclusion of certain voices.

Backstage, facilitators engage in political work, constructing performable publics, scripting interaction orders, and translating outputs. They are often involved in culture change projects, promoting new ways of working between civil society and the state. This can lead to tensions between tradition and change as democratic innovations challenge established practices and roles.

Escobar argues that more research is needed on the types and impacts of facilitation across contexts, focusing on the "how" of the practice. He believes that studying facilitation, despite methodological challenges, is crucial for understanding the inner workings of democratic innovations.

In conclusion, Escobar portrays facilitators as political workers navigating a landscape of tensions and power struggles as they advance participatory and deliberative practices. By shedding light on their work, he invites us to consider the micropolitics of public participation and deliberation, and how facilitators shape these processes in both visible and invisible ways.