We hear it all the time: America is hopelessly divided, our politics irreparably broken. But if you spend time talking with everyday people across mid-sized cities, you’ll discover a different story. One where people are hungry for connection, for voice and for a sense that democracy can still work.

The good news? Digital technology, when used with intention, can help rebuild civic life from the ground up.

To be sure, technology can replicate our worst biases and be used to manipulate and exploit users. But across the country, communities are showing us how digital tools can also bring people together – across ideology, background and geography – to deliberate, solve problems and strengthen local democracy.

From participatory AI to digital town squares, a new civic infrastructure is emerging. And many cities are leading the way with important lessons to guide safe, effective and thoughtful implementation across the country.

Community listening, at scale

Take Bowling Green, one of the fastest growing cities in Kentucky. When city officials wanted to craft a long-term plan for the future, they didn’t put up a survey or host a single public hearing. They used AI-enabled platforms: Residents could submit their ideas through Polis, a program for hosting discussions and deliberations. Over the month-long What Could BG Be conversation, 7,890 residents weighed in 1,034,868 times. The city then used another AI tool (Sensemaker, developed by Google’s Jigsaw) to identify common themes and summarize them in an interactive report.

Now, officials have a list of priorities, informed by the public, and are moving forward with bringing those ideas to life. Polis isn’t a flashy polling app; it’s an open source tool that lets people engage with others’ ideas, find areas of consensus and surface nuanced insights that can shape real policy decisions. Unlike traditional surveys, Polis shows participants how their views align with their neighbors, making visible the quiet middle ground that so often goes ignored. Built by The Computational Democracy Project, it has been used by governments, newspapers and residents from Taiwan to Greece.

AI tools can also help facilitate another kind of engagement that’s been used all around the world: Citizen assemblies. These civic innovations use lotteries to create a representative sample of residents, who then help officials make decisions about governing. Organizers can use a range of technology – from AI support tools to text bot chats – to augment the process. Across cities in France, assemblies have allowed citizens to deliberate on contentious issues ranging from climate change to end-of-life care. In the case of the citizens’ convention on end of life, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council collaborated with Make.org to implement the tool Panoramic. This AI tool worked to create digestible summaries of the assembly’s work to the larger public, thereby increasing accessibility. DemocracyNext and MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication are now doing a two-year pilot specifically on how AI can be leveraged for future citizen assemblies.

This spring in Fort Collins, Colorado, the city is hosting a citizen assembly, investing $150,000 in public dollars towards a lottery based process to engage residents in shaping the future of a highly contested 163-acre parcel of city owned land. For this assembly, technology is being used, as described by organizing partner Healthy Democracy, to listen at scale.

Assembly organizers have scaled public input through polls, surveys and platforms like Our City, which helps increase transparency by sharing information presented to the assembly to the broader public. In addition to public accessibility, technology has been proven useful in synthesizing large data sets. With the help of AI, organizers were able to identify key points of consensus in 1100 short form responses submitted by the public.

Even platforms not originally designed for civic life can be adapted to serve it. On Discord, community organizations have utilized the platform, originally designed for gamers, as a modern day bulletin board and town square. Scholars have noted it to be a platform that fosters a participatory culture given its low barrier to entry. Early during the pandemic, ListoAmerica, a Latinx organization serving underserved youth, created a server to foster connection amongst its members, build mentorship and provide support. With Discord, organizers can use moderated channels to host discussions on everything from housing policy to youth mental health, offering a space for real-time dialogue and meeting people where they are at.

Rethinking participation

What do all these efforts have in common?

They lower the barriers to engagement, making it easier for people to be heard. They amplify collective intelligence, not just individual opinions. Perhaps most importantly, they rebuild trust by showing residents that their ideas matter, that civic processes are responsive and that democracy can still be a two-way street.

But the rise of civic tech also raises big questions. Who controls the platforms and data collected? How are public inputs translated into policy? Are there feedback loops to translate residents’ preferences, hopes and ideas into policy making? And if not, how is that accurately and effectively conveyed back to participants? Are the tools truly deliberative? What is the fine line between sentiment mining, analysis, and genuine deliberation and participation?

Whether it’s AI for governance, civic feedback platforms or broader digital public infrastructure, the issue isn’t just the tech itself. It’s about who’s at the table, how decisions are made and whether technology empowers people – or sidelines them.

To truly transform civic life, we need more than apps. We need public-interest technology that is accountable, inclusive, and designed for deliberation rather than division.

This means investing in open-source tools like Polis. It requires supporting local governments with training and capacity, and creating feedback loops so that public input leads to visible action. It also means centering equity: ensuring these tools reach the communities most often left out of decision-making.

Most of all, it means resisting the idea that civic tech is a silver bullet. It’s not. But it can be a powerful catalyst, especially when grounded in local values, inclusive processes and human connection. Ideally, these tools create more (not less) and better quality in-person engagement by creating opportunities for people to come together and collaboratively solve public problems.

At a time when loneliness is rising, trust is eroding and traditional civic spaces are fading, technology gives us a new frontier for engagement. Not to replace in-person connection, but to enhance it. Not to automate democracy, but to deepen it.

If we get this right — if we build tools that invite, include and listen — we just might find that the future of civic life is not as divided as it seems.

This post was originally published on Next City.