KNOWLEDGE CAFE - HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT 2024

Have we forgotten what a good democracy feels like? In the UK, we don’t need scientific studies to show that people do not feel like their voices are heard or that we have a say in how our country or society is run. There are few channels of democratic engagement between election times. 

In a deliberative democracy, voices matter more than votes.

Amongst the research papers on collective intelligence covering how the latest developments in AI technology can support and scale deliberations, a gap has been identified in evaluating the human participant experience versus how quickly decisions are made or how the machine is trained and machine learning.

This is why Bella Roberts, our speaker, focused explicitly on the feelings of empowerment which includes an increased knowledge and understanding of the subject and other people’s perspectives for her Masters thesis research project.

In this Knowledge Cafe, with its principles of open dialogue, light structure, and free-flowing conversation, we will discuss what democracy means and how we feel about it. It promises to be fertile ground to learn from each other, connect with people, and better understand a complex topic, but most importantly, improve our inner understanding of something so fundamental as Democracy.