Reimagining the Town Hall Meeting for the AI Age

For centuries, town halls have been the centerpiece of civic engagement, sites where governance by the people was put into practice. As politics and society have transformed in recent decades however, citizens and elected leaders alike find they too often fall short.

In partnership with InnoEngine, a Bowling Green-based consultancy, Jigsaw launched What Could BG Be?, a month-long county-wide conversation designed to allow the people of Warren County, Kentucky to share their hopes and dreams and shape the future of their community in the face of explosive growth.

What resulted was the largest town hall in United States history, and one that produced actionable insights in minutes rather than months.

Leveraging AI, Jigsaw translated 3,940 ideas shared by nearly 8,000 local residents and weighed in on over a million times into a public report containing a set of actionable insights. State and local leaders globally are now better able to invite their constituents into navigating unprecedented change in their communities.

To learn more about how you can run your own large-scale conversation, and how you can leverage AI to make sense of it, see our sensemaking library and how-to guide.