In recent years, commercially-developed communication technology has expanded the capacity and capabilities for many aspects of modern life. Unfortunately there has been very little investment to support technology specifically designed to advance the public sector, and and so most commercial webinar technology is ill-suited to the use case of democratic engagement. The long-term declines in trust in government, combined with the rise of polarization and misinformation, strongly suggest the need to develop new methods to connect the people with their government, and to enable individuals to have a voice in policy making.
The TeCD-Lab's mission is to use normative democratic theory to scaffold the development of webinar technology. Commercially-available webinar platforms are designed to disempower the audience from expressing their perspectives in response to a speaker in real time during a meeting. We have developed a normative framework to re-imagine the webinar, showing that innovative webinar technology motivated by deliberative theory enables us to envision new design solutions to empower audiences and to enable deliberation during a synchronous meeting. Our innovative webinar platform, called Prytaneum, was developed using this framework. Our normative framework provides design best practices for the webinar industry and enables the development of new communication theory for synchronous engagement.