Introduction
Election campaigns generate a lot of information, but communities do not always get to shape the questions at the centre of the conversation.
Before an election, people have questions about the issues that affect their daily lives across jobs, education, healthcare, roads, water and local development.
Coalition for Open Discourse, a civic organisation wanted to understand what communities themselves wanted candidates to address, rather than deciding the agenda on their behalf.
Through WatchTower, people could submit questions through voice, text and messaging in familiar languages. AI helped organise questions, identify recurring themes and connect questions coming from different communities.
“We know what we want to ask. We just need someone to listen.”
One question represents one person's concern. But when similar questions emerge across many communities, they can reveal what people want discussed collectively.
Hearing what the numbers can miss
Election surveys can show which issues rank highly with respondents. But they do not always capture the questions behind those priorities.
People may care about healthcare, for example, but have very different questions about access, staffing, cost or quality.
Community-generated questions preserve that detail while showing where concerns are shared across communities.
How we listened
WatchTower was used to collect questions from communities and build a picture of what people wanted candidates to address.
Reporting in familiar languages:
People could ask questions in the languages they use in everyday life.
Voice and text reporting:
Community members could submit questions through voice, SMS, WhatsApp and other accessible channels.
Translation and organisation:
AI translated and structured questions so contributions in different languages could be understood together.
Connecting related reports:
AI grouped related questions around recurring issues while preserving the different ways communities expressed them.
Building the community agenda
The resulting picture showed which questions were emerging across locations and which concerns were specific to particular communities.
A picture began to emerge
As questions accumulated, individual concerns started to form a broader picture of what communities wanted to discuss.
- Related reports
- 286
- Communities
- 31
- Languages
- 6
- Reporting period
- 5months
What communities wanted answered
Recurring questions centred on jobs and livelihoods, healthcare, education, roads and infrastructure, water and public services, and local development.
Some questions were shared widely. Others reflected concerns specific to particular communities.
Together, they created a community-generated agenda for election conversations.
Explore on mapFrom questions to public dialogue
The questions could be used by civic organisations and community groups to structure candidate forums, public dialogues and other spaces for direct engagement.
Rather than deciding what communities should ask, the process gives communities a way to define the questions themselves.
Why it matters
Democratic participation is not only about choosing between candidates. It is also about having opportunities to ask questions about the issues that matter to communities.
WatchTower helps communities turn hundreds of individual questions into a shared picture of what they want candidates to address.
AI makes that possible across many people, places and languages, while keeping the agenda rooted in what communities themselves are asking.
