What is Idobata?

When many people write on a single message board, the loudest voices tend to stand out, and the discussion often fails to come together. Yet listening to people one by one takes far too much effort. "Idobata" is a tool that tries to solve this problem by having an AI listen to each person individually and then connect what it hears.

In short

Idobata is a tool in which each person chats one-on-one with an AI, and AI gathers the content into "everyone's issues" or "proposed revisions to policy" [1][2].

It is built by the Japanese volunteer community Digital Democracy 2030 (DD2030). Its program code is public, so that anyone can reuse it for free (open source) [1].

For example

Team Mirai's "interactive policy platform" (2025 House of Councillors election). The political party Team Mirai launched it on May 16, 2025. When a voter chats with the AI, the AI asks questions and helps the voter put their thoughts into words. At the end, the AI puts together a proposed change to the manifesto (the party's campaign promises) and sends it [2].

Four days later, party leader Takahiro Anno posted that more than 1,300 proposal documents had come in, "more than ten times what we expected". In the end, 8,559 policy proposals were received [2].

A workshop inside Cybozu. The AI asked follow-up questions about what participants had written, digging deeper. The AI read 50 people's chats in a few minutes and produced a report of the themes that came up often and the points where opinions agreed or differed [3].

A residents' meeting in Higashiosaka. After meetings in which residents discussed things with one another, Idobata was used as a place to keep collecting opinions. The AI organized 12 issues, including "From an anxious future to a hopeful one" [4]. → Broad listening in local governments

Ota City's "Jibungotokaigi" (November 2025 – January 2026). According to the city's minutes, at the first session of this meeting of randomly chosen residents, Plural Reality LLC introduced Idobata. It has two functions: the AI answers questions about city policies, and when someone writes, for example, that a system is hard to understand, the AI asks back how it is hard to read and how they would like it to be, to dig deeper. At the final session, participants could send revisions to the draft proposal while bouncing ideas off the AI with "Idobata Manifesto" (the minutes' spelling). In their closing comments, some participants said watching the AI pull the discussion together was helpful, or that having time to sort out their views on a smartphone helped them stay calm, while one said a feeling of resentment remained (the minutes do not say whether this was aimed at the AI) [15].

How it works

Two components

Idobata is made of two components that can be used separately [1].

• Idobata Vision — A party, local government, company, school or other organizer sets a theme. Users write opinions and questions freely in a chat. The system extracts the important points and organizes them as "key issues". It is the component for widely gathering visions of the future and directions.
• Idobata Policy — The component for revising an existing draft (such as a manifesto) through dialogue with users. Proposed changes are created as "pull requests" (requests to make a change) on GitHub, a website for sharing programs [1][5].

The README (explanatory document) says that using the two in sequence lets one handle everything from finding problems to making measures concrete, in one continuous flow [1].

Why it was built

The README lists the problems with earlier attempts at discussion: opinions do not come together, only the loud voices remain, and it is hard to connect gathered opinions to policy [1].

At DD2030's launch press conference on January 16, 2025, Anno announced this as the project for "reflecting public opinion in policy". The idea was to build a place for large-scale online discussion, modeled on Taiwan's vTaiwan and JOIN (the Taiwanese government's citizen-participation website) [6][7].

A new form: "connected through AI"

In the book Broad Listening (written by volunteers in the DD2030 community), Hirokazu Nishio's section explains Idobata as a third form of communication [2].

• The first is a form in which everyone is in the same chat (message boards and the like).
• The second is a closed form between one person and an AI (ChatGPT and the like).
• The third is Idobata, in which people "in separate chats" are "connected through AI".

For example, the AIs in Idobata Policy share "the current platform". When a human approves a revision that came out of a dialogue with one person, the AI talking with the next person reads the revised manifesto as it talks [2]. Nishio links this to the argument of the philosopher John Dewey that changes in technology change the shape of "the public" [2]. → Emergent publics

What is debated

Reflections by those involved

These come from Hirokazu Nishio, who worked on the technical side of the interactive policy platform.

• Not feeling heard. With the interactive policy platform, things ended once a proposal was sent. People could not see how it was handled afterward, and some said they did not feel their opinions had been received. Nishio concludes that a system is needed that lets people follow where their opinion went [2].
• Proposals too detailed, and clashing. Dozens of revisions piled up on the same passage, and staff had to read them all and rewrite by brute force. Nishio writes that perhaps what the AI should have asked was not so much how to revise the wording as what people are struggling with. Nishio then cites Audrey Tang's procedure for discussion: first gather facts, then feelings, and only after that ask for ideas [2].
• GitHub turned into a message board as it was. One proposal once drew 236 comments [8]. Barbed exchanges broke out, and some people used Anno's face photo as their icon without permission. On X, misleading information spread that took this for an "internal discussion" within Team Mirai. Nishio writes that GitHub should not have been shown directly, and should have been covered with a dedicated interface [2].

Criticism and assessment from outside

• Quality of proposals, and responsibility. One citizen's note.com article reports criticisms that the original proposals were of low quality and that the review process should be fixed. It goes on to write that open-source citizen participation leaves responsibility unclear, and even that Team Mirai is effectively throwing away the proposals it gathered. Part of this claim, however, has not been verified [9]. For reference, Team Mirai's policy repository has received 9,686 proposals in total, of which 194 have been merged. Updates to the manifesto on GitHub ended on July 26, 2025 [10][11].
• Hard to tell what the tool is for. Another note.com writer commented that Idobata Vision is hard for first-time users to understand, and that it feels like a public comment procedure (a government's call for opinions on a draft) [12].
• An assessment from a proponent. In an interview for the Japanese book 2030 来たるべき世界 (excerpted by AERA DIGITAL in March 2026), Audrey Tang, one of the authors of Plurality, said that if good polling methods like the Idobata system emerge, various city councils and different parties in Japan will adopt them, and that DD2030's great potential lies in going beyond partisanship [18].
• Who decides the range of what is heard? An article in the magazine Noema (June 2026) pointed out that the program of the AI chatbot Team Mirai used in the 2026 House of Representatives election had "NG words" (banned words) set for conversations to avoid. (The article does not name that chatbot as Idobata.) Its point is that, together with the constraints on the side of the underlying AI (Claude), the boundaries of political conversation may be set in several places. At the same time, the article credits the tool as democratic in that it did not force consensus and left judgment to the party and voters [13].

Where it fits in Plurality

The book Plurality does not mention Idobata by name. But it is one Japanese implementation of the tools for holding conversations at large scale that chapter 5-4, "Augmented Deliberation", describes (Polis, vTaiwan, and broad listening with AI) [14].

While DD2030's Kouchou AI is a tool for turning gathered voices into a map, Idobata handles the side of listening to voices one by one, pulling them together and connecting them to the next action. The two are two of the three projects announced at DD2030's launch [6].

The book Broad Listening stresses that Idobata "is not 'owned by Team Mirai'; it is a public asset that anyone can use". It says that in 2025 preparations were also under way to introduce it in another party, but these faded away after the person in charge on the other side was reassigned [2]. Separately, at a press conference on April 22, 2025, Jun'ya Ogawa, secretary-general of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, reported that the party had approved launching and starting to run a large-scale deliberation system, "Rikken AI Idobata Kaigi" (provisional name), as a DD2030 pilot, and said the party wanted to reflect widely supported policies in its policies and campaign pledges [16][17]. The materials collected do not confirm whether it actually ran, or whether the other party the book mentions was the Constitutional Democratic Party.

Further reading

1. Broad Listening, chapter 6, section 1 "Team Mirai's Efforts in the 2025 House of Councillors Election" (Japanese and English, book, free to read) — https://broadlisteningbook.com/
2. Noema, "Democracy Needs Friction To Function" (English, critical article) — https://www.noemamag.com/democracy-needs-friction-to-function
3. DD2030, "いどばた" (Idobata) introduction page (in Japanese, web) — https://dd2030.org/idobata
4. Hirokazu Nishio, "チームみらいの社会実験『しゃべれるマニフェスト』から得られた知見" (Insights from Team Mirai's social experiment, the interactive policy platform) (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/nishiohirokazu/n/nb35e8d526fd4
5. The idobata repository and README (in Japanese, software) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/idobata
6. Full transcript of DD2030's launch press conference (in Japanese, record) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/nfd4a855cd1a8

Sources

1. idobata README (in Japanese) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/idobata
2. Broad Listening, chapter 6, section 1 "Team Mirai's Efforts in the 2025 House of Councillors Election" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/06_01_team_mirai.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
3. Broad Listening, chapter 9, section 2 "Cybozu's Approach — Connecting Hard-to-Hear Voices to the Next Discussion" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/09_02_cybozu.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
4. Broad Listening, chapter 10, section 3 "Plural Reality" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/10_03_plural_reality.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
5. Broad Listening, "Appendix: Glossary" (English version) — https://broadlisteningbook.com/ ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
6. Full transcript of DD2030's launch press conference (in Japanese) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/nfd4a855cd1a8
7. DD2030, "いどばた" (Idobata) introduction page (in Japanese) — https://dd2030.org/idobata
8. Hirokazu Nishio, "チームみらいの社会実験『しゃべれるマニフェスト』から得られた知見" (Insights from Team Mirai's social experiment, the interactive policy platform) (in Japanese) — https://note.com/nishiohirokazu/n/nb35e8d526fd4
9. "『チームみらい』が唱える『Plurality』は看板だけにならないか" (Will the "Plurality" Team Mirai advocates end up as just a signboard?) (note, in Japanese) — https://note.com/ippanjin_2025/n/n299555fb4908
10. team-mirai/policy repository (counts as of 2026-09-24) — https://github.com/team-mirai/policy
11. team-mirai/policy README (in Japanese) — https://github.com/team-mirai/policy
12. 電気好太郎, "デジタル民主主義２０３０の『いどばたビジョン』って何のツールなの？" (What kind of tool is DD2030's Idobata Vision?) (note, 2025-06-03, in Japanese) — https://note.com/denkikotaro/n/nf9df91dcb4af
13. Noema, "Democracy Needs Friction To Function" (2026-06-10) — https://www.noemamag.com/democracy-needs-friction-to-function
14. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］
15. Ota City, detailed minutes of "Ota City Jibungotokaigi 2025" (in Japanese) — meeting 1 https://www.city.ota.gunma.jp/uploaded/attachment/37187.pdf , meeting 4 https://www.city.ota.gunma.jp/uploaded/attachment/38086.pdf
16. Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Secretary-General Ogawa's press conference on "Rikken AI Idobata Kaigi" (2025-04-22, in Japanese) — https://cdp-japan.jp/news/20250422_9145
17. Tokyo Sports WEB (2025-04-22), on the CDP's "Rikken AI Idobata Kaigi" with Takahiro Anno (in Japanese) — https://www.tokyo-sports.co.jp/articles/-/341976
18. AERA DIGITAL (2026-03-26), interview with Audrey Tang, excerpted from the book 2030 来たるべき世界 (in Japanese) — https://dot.asahi.com/books/articles/-/278484