The city of Bowling Green, Kentucky, recently asked its citizens a big question: How would they like to see their area evolve over the next 25 years?
The nearly 4,000 online responses and more than 1 million votes collected over the course of a month were predictably broad. People weighed in on everything from healthcare and education to preserving historic buildings and adding a Dave & Buster’s outpost.
And in order to summarize, categorize, and understand this flood of feedback in a timely fashion, local leaders turned to an LLM-based tool called Sensemaker from Google’s Jigsaw division. A local strategy consultancy called Innovation Engine and the Computational Democracy Project also worked on the effort.
Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green said the project could serve as a blueprint for how AI and digital tools can better facilitate productive civic conversations online.
“The magic formula that Bowling Green has brought to life is what’s possible when you give people open-ended prompts and use AI to make sense of what they want,” Green said.
Why Bowling Green: The population of Warren County, where Bowling Green is situated, is set to double in size over the next quarter century, authorities there say. The city, situated near Nashville, is home to Western Kentucky University as well as large corporations like Fruit of the Loom and the assembly plant for the Chevrolet Corvette. It has a relatively politically mixed population, according to precinct-level 2024 election results.
“The thing that [Bowling Green is] experiencing, which I think is a good microcosm of what’s happening in a lot of other places, is a ton of change,” Green said. “They’re doubling in size over the next 20 years. That means jobs and development and things that sound like good things—economic growth—but a real mixed bag of emotions about it.”
Shadow work: Ahead of the project, Google Jigsaw staffers spent time with various community members to understand some of the barriers to civic participation. They took them to public forums, like a planning commission meeting, a tree planting meeting, and a meeting of the Historic Preservation Committee, according to Green.
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From those outings and other groundwork, Green said Jigsaw coined a concept called the participation paradox—citizens tended to define their community more narrowly than the city as a whole: a local sports team, a church, the LGBTQ community. “As soon as you start talking about town-wide or civic, they don’t consider that being their role,” Green said.
Green said that research informed outreach work that aimed to solicit opinions from as wide a cross-section of the populace as possible, advertising in nine languages at international supermarkets, holding church events, and visiting refugee communities.
What the report found: Powered by Google’s Gemini family, Sensemaker identified topics of high and low consensus. More local healthcare specialists, historic preservation, and repurposing empty retail space were examples of issues where many agreed. Marijuana legalization and private schools were more contentious. (And, with apologies to adult arcade lovers: The Dave & Buster’s proposal was also fiercely contested.)
“Everyone, including local leaders and local participants, were really struck by the amount of common ground,” Green said.
The AI tool helped cut down on the time that it took to compile responses into a report, from months to minutes, Green said. The Sensemaker and Gemini software zeroed in on specific topics to focus attention on “the most relevant information for a particular task,” according to the company.
“The tool that we built, Sensemaker, allowed you to do three things using Gemini: understand what people care about, understand why they care about it...and then matching all of the statements to the topics people care about, and then actually producing an analysis or a summary report,” Green said.
The Sensemaker tool is open-source and available for other municipalities to use, according to Green. The Jigsaw team is currently looking at other potential case studies for productive large-scale online conversations, she said.
“We are looking at our next high-touch partnership and looking at what concept we might test next,” Green said. “It’s interesting to me how much green field there is in conversations online.”