Participant support
/Participant support
Helping participants use a platform can require a significant time commitment. Consider hosting public trainings as part of your outreach plan. The Codeando México team found that a chat group on a platform like WhatsApp was a helpful way to support people struggling to use the digital platform.
Multilingual engagement
People speak thousands of languages, and it isn't uncommon to be able to hear hundreds of different dialects spoken within a single city. Expecting people to meaningfully contribute to an open participation process in a language they don't speak is unreasonable, and will empower speakers of the dominant language at the expense of other linguistic communities.
Developers of digital participation platforms responded to this need by integrating translation features into their products. Sometimes this means they hire translators; other times, volunteers are recruited. Still another option is translation produced by artificial intelligence, via services like Google Translate or DeepL. However, while machine translation is rapidly improving, it isn't perfect.
Some AI models are explicitly trained to support smaller languages, including:
CDIAL, "Digitizing Local Languages, Localizing Digital access for 1 Billion Africans" (based in Nigeria).
Meta's Massively Multilingual Speech AI research model, which as of 2023 "can identify more than 4,000 spoken languages" and "expand text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology from around 100 languages to more than 1,100" (based in the United States).
La Infrastructura Pública de IA Abierta y Multilingüe (ALIA) (based in Spain), designed to be "Europe's first public, open and multilingual AI infrastructure" and to work "with texts in more than 35 European languages."
ARIJ's AI playbook, which includes an updated directory of which AI models support Arabic (based in Jordan).
Yodi, which does AI translation between Ewè to English (based in Togo).
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