Finding Common Ground at Scale: Agora Citizen Network at Devconnect Argentina 2025

At Devconnect Argentina 2025, Agora Citizen Network co-founder Yuting Jiang introduced Agora's work on digital deliberation, collective sensemaking, and building a healthier digital town square for citizens and facilitators.

The talk connects the rise of polarization with the need to scale meaningful dialogue, not just voting or social media engagement. It also shares how Agora combines opinion mapping, privacy-preserving identity, and community-led consultations to help groups find common ground at scale.

Key Themes

• Finding common ground at scale through structured online deliberation.
• Collective sensemaking instead of engagement farming.
• Plurality instead of popularity metrics.
• d/acc: decentralized and democratic, differential defensive acceleration
• Community consultations such as #bloquonstout, where Agora helped protesters and facilitators identify shared priorities.

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Edited Transcript

Hello everyone. Nice meeting you. My name is Yuting. I am the co-founder of Agora Citizen Network. We are trying to build solutions to rehumanize and depolarize citizen dialogues.

I am really happy to be here to share our journey building Agora, and some of the lessons we have learned from building digital pro-social spaces.

We started the project about two years ago, before 2024, the year of elections, when around four billion people around the world, almost half the global population, were eligible voters.

Some people called it a year of democracy. Although in some societies, what we witnessed was almost the opposite of democratic flourishing. We saw increasing polarization and shrinking space for meaningful dialogue.

That is an issue because, in systems where people vote but rarely talk to each other, people become divided. It becomes easier for centralized power to manipulate public opinion and take over. That is why we also need to scale dialogue.

We all know that Twitter is amazing for building a movement, but it is not so great for co-writing a constitution.

On the other side, we have deliberation tools like Polis, Remesh, and others, which are used in public consultations and citizens' assemblies by governments. But they are built from a top-down approach, so they lack the grassroots spirit of social apps.

So what if the next digital town square could do both?

What if our next digital town square was not built for followers and influencers, but for citizens and facilitators of dialogue? What if it was not built for engagement farming, but for collective sensemaking? What if it was not built for popularity, but for plurality?

These were the ideas that guided us to found Agora, and Europe turned out to be the perfect place for that.

The EU is giving out billions of euros to fund d/acc technologies: decentralized, democratic, and defensive technologies. Next Generation Internet in particular gives out around 50 million euros to fund open-source software projects.

We applied twice and were rejected, but each time we were given feedback to iterate and improve. The third time, we received a grant. Then we received another, and then another grant from the French government.

So to all the d/acc builders out there who are in Europe, or considering moving there, definitely check this out.

Now, back to Agora. How does it work?

On Agora, instead of liking, upvoting, or downvoting each other's posts, users can vote agree, disagree, or pass on each other's opinions.

Then we run a machine learning algorithm based on Polis, a deliberation tool developed by the Computational Democracy Project and widely used in civic technology.

What it does is opinion clustering. Basically, it groups people who tend to vote in similar patterns. What is useful is that we are then able to see which ideas make the groups different, and which ideas each group shares.

We are trying to create a system that, instead of rewarding engagement that leads to polarization, rewards bridging opinions: ideas that reveal hidden consensus across the opinion spectrum.

Another key challenge when building Agora is how we handle identity and data. How can we provide privacy, censorship resistance, and user agency? Which protocol should we use: Farcaster, AT Protocol, or ActivityPub?

We do not have a single answer to that, so we decided to put users at the center. How about letting humans be the API to the services they use?

Instead of asking users to create traditional accounts, like on Twitter, we generate decentralized identifiers for them and anchor these identifiers with zero-knowledge proofs.

For now, we support Rarimo's ZK Passport and Zupass. Rarimo users can anonymously prove things like citizenship or age group without revealing personal data to us.

What we want to empower users to do is selectively disclose which aspects of their identity they want to share, and decide where their data should be stored.

If they want their data to be broadcast to a decentralized protocol like Farcaster, they can choose that. If they do not want to broadcast something sensitive to a decentralized network because they worry it may not be deletable afterward, they should be able to choose that too.

We started building this last summer, and this summer we finally rolled it out.

In September, Agora was used in France by a team of facilitation experts during the national strike #bloquonstout, which literally translates to "let's block everything."

The strike was a response to a potential budget cut proposed by the prime minister, who wanted to cut public spending. He resigned quickly, but frustration was running very high. The facilitation experts wanted to find out where alignment currently lay among protesters.

It was clear that people were angry, but what did they want to propose collectively?

In this consultation, we gathered more than 200 participants, who submitted more than 100 statements and generated more than 7,000 votes.

Two opinion groups emerged. One group proposed more radical reforms, including demanding the resignation of President Macron. A smaller group disagreed with that. However, despite the differences between the groups, there was consensus around taxing the ultra-rich, the top 0.1% of the population.

I am sure many of you agree, especially crypto people. But this consensus also mirrored an official poll in France showing transpartisan support for the Zucman tax. The tax calls for a 2% tax on wealth exceeding 100 million euros, which concerns around 1,000 families in France.

The goal of the consultation was to help communities see what people think within their community, and where alignment lies.

For Devconnect, we are also running a series of consultations ranging from d/acc to building future cities and Ethereum's role in Latin America. You only need to verify your ticket via Zupass, and then you will be able to participate.

We are still very, very early stage. My co-founder and I will be around the venue. We are very happy to chat with you, hear your feedback, and invite you to join us in co-creating the next digital town square.

Thank you.

Keywords: Agora Citizen Network, Devconnect Argentina 2025, digital deliberation, finding common ground at scale, collective sensemaking, digital town square, opinion mapping, Polis, zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized identity, Zupass, ZK Passport, civic technology, democratic innovation, #bloquonstout, Zucman tax, d/acc.