Interview with Takahiro Yasuno! Digital Democracy

2025-01-24 Go! Go! Kokumin Live Special Edition - Interview with Takahiro Yasuno! Digital Democracy - #Katsuya Haruha, #Takae Ito, #Takahiro Yasuno https://www.youtube.com/live/iR0W7kyaV7c

Summary (focusing on the broad listening portion)

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• What is Broad Listening.

• This is a system that uses AI to collect and analyze all kinds of "voices," including SNS, YouTube comments, e-mails, and phone calls, to give organizations, political parties, and local governments an overall picture of the vast number of opinions they have. In addition to conventional "direct requests" and "petitions," the system can also pick up voices buried on the Internet.

• Taiwan case study.

  • The official Taiwanese government website "Join" and the citizen-led "vTaiwan" are typical examples.
  • For example, "Join" is a system in which the government always considers and responds to proposals that receive 5,000 or more votes of approval. The number of users is 1.5 million out of Taiwan's population of 23 million, and many of the more than 10,000 suggestions made so far have actually been adopted as policies.
  • Through these platforms, it is easier to pick up minority opinions and the voices of the younger generation.

• Results of a trial run on the NDP side.

  • We ran the 2,000 or so opinions we received via Google Forms through AI.
    • I didn't see how they called for submissions, but if you can collect 2000 with a Google Form, you can go around doing broad listening inexpensively without X API costs.
  • Each opinion can be grouped and organized visually to see what policy requests are the most common.
  • In fact, the results showed that many respondents were calling for a "¥1,030,000 barrier," "strengthening social security," and "proposal-based politics.
  • By leaving the task of compiling a large number of comments to the AI, it is possible to get a bird's eye view of the "buried voices" that cannot be picked up by human labor.

• Barriers to adoption (challenges in promoting broad listening in Japan).

• 1.Organizational decision making: AI application itself can easily become an objective. If it is not determined at the beginning which department and who will actually reflect the collected voices in the policy, it will become a mere skeleton.

• 2.Lack of human resources: Engineers and expertise in using AI are needed. Even if it is released as open source, it is difficult to make use of it if local governments and political parties do not have the ability to operate it.

• 3.Process to grow AI: "What data to feed and what instructions to give" will change the results. Continuous tuning is necessary to improve accuracy.

• 4.Cost: The larger the collection, the greater the volume of analysis, and the more expensive it is to use the system and cloud computing. At the national and municipal level, the key is how to secure budgets.

• 5.Digital Divide: How to handle the opinions of those who are not familiar with the Internet environment and devices. Multiple channels are needed, such as phone reception, texting by mail, etc.

• Future Outlook.

  • Since "AI visualization" is just a tool, it is important how organizations, political parties, and local governments incorporate it and reflect it in their policies and budgets.
  • If the system can be introduced in earnest at the government and municipal level, it will make it easier to objectively visualize policy priorities while picking up minority opinions and buried voices.
  • The goal is to create a system that can be freely customized by each region and party through open source and broad participation.
  • It can be applied not only to politics but also to other uses, for example, "transparency of political funds (real-time disclosure of expenditures).

The above is an overview of the importance of "broad listening" and the challenges and prospects for advancing digital democracy. The key is not the introduction of the tool itself, but "how to operationalize the voices picked up and at what level to link them to actual policies.

Eiichi0614 []](https://x.com/Eiichi0614/status/1882972683203408299) In any case, House of Councilors member Takae Ito (@itotakae0630) responded to the secretary-general's reckless request and even gave constructive feedback to Ms. Anno, indicating that she is serious about this issue. I hope both KDP and Ms. Anno will do their best. I wish both KDP and Ms. Anno the best of luck. #I am excited about the KDP!

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