The project Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up): Enhancing Large-scale Public Arbitrations in Real Time was funded 04/2017 – 12/2021 by the Volkswagen Foundation. ADD-up promotes interdisciplinary research in the field of computational social science. Principal investigators are Prof. Dr. Annette Hautli-Janisz (General and Computational Linguistics), Dr. Brian Plüss (Argumentation Mining and Visualization), and Dr. Valentin Gold (Political Science).

The aim of this project is to capitalize on the increasing digitalisation of society for advancing techniques of participatory democracy. For instance, analyses of sport events broadcast on TV (e.g. football games) are presented to the viewer by way of augmented reality, a technique which is used to enhance the experience of the viewer with computer-supplied data. The aim of the present project is to automatically monitor and enhance large-scale participatory processes in a similar way. Through an interdisciplinary collaboration between Political Science (University of Göttingen, Germany), Linguistics (University of Konstanz, Germany - now Passau University) and Computer Science (University of Dundee, Scotland), we will develop ADD-up, an innovative system for Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD).

More details on the technical framework can be found at https://addup.valentingold.de.

There are also two demonstration videos available at https://addup.valentingold.de/demo/, e.g. a time lapse video of a VisArgue Fracking debate: 

Previously, we have published a prototype in collaborative work with VALIDA, see the video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/LhoLLcE9Vlw. Some of our ideas and potentials are demonstrated (in German) at https://tvduell.valentingold.de.