Democracy Innovators Podcast · democracyinnovators.com

Yuting Jiang on the Agora Citizen Network, Polis and bridging-based algorithms

·43 min·2 clips

At Four Seas in Chiang Mai, five groups disagreed over whether public-interest communities should monetize.

1. Democracy Innovators Podcast speaks with Yuting Zhang about Agora Citizen Network and bridging-based algorithms. 2. Yuting Zhang is a co-founder of Agora Citizen Network, and the show frames him as the person explaining why the project matters. 3. The episode asks what Agora Citizen Network is for: a deliberative space that can turn disagreement into structured, constructive dialogue. 4. Yuting says Agora is a fully open-source deliberative tool and a dialogue space, and he places the team in Paris. 5. He says the project started about two years ago in 2024 after seeing elections continue while dialogue spaces shrank and polarization grew online. 6. Yuting explains that the team wanted pro-social designs and algorithms in a space co-created with users. 7. He says Agora was inspired by Polis and by Colin McGill’s line that Twitter was good for building a movement but not for writing a constitution. 8. He says the team chose to abstract the Polis algorithm instead of forking Polis directly. 9. He describes the algorithm as machine learning that sorts opinion groups by how people vote agree, disagree, or unsure on each other’s statements. 10. He says the analysis shows which statements divide groups, which make them unique, and which opinions unite the room. 11. Yuting says the team rewrote the algorithm in Python with an open-source developer so it could become a library. 12. He says that choice would let other teams build different products on top of the same algorithm. 13. He says Agora keeps the same agree-disagree-unsure mechanism and an analysis tab that shows common ground and divisions. 14. Yuting says the project began earlier in decentralized identity and used zero-knowledge proof to let people prove age, nationality, or community membership without revealing personal data. 15. He says that work was motivated by bots, astroturfing campaigns, and a 2024 statistic he cites from Taoist Group that one-third of internet traffic was generated by bots. 16. He says a forum for students and teachers showed that anonymity alone was not enough because trolling still appeared. 17. Yuting says Agora was used in Chiang Mai at Four Seas, a Web3 community and permanent Zuza Lu node, during a session on sustainable funding for public-interest spaces. 18. He says the room split into purists and pragmatists, and the live voting helped speakers comment on the results as they appeared. 19. The interview stays technical and reflective, with repeated examples from product design, civic consultations, and live moderation. 20. People building civic tech, deliberation tools, or community platforms would get the most from it; listeners wanting a high-level politics chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A civic-tech conversation about shrinking dialogue spaces and the software built to widen them.

Yuting Zhang's conversation about Agora Citizen Network frames deliberation software as a practical answer to familiar democratic strain: elections keep coming, while spaces for dialogue narrow and polarization deepens online.

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