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The mission of Shotoku 2.0

Listen to ten voices at once and find agreement—an ancient ideal, implemented with AI at modern scale.

Background: the problem we want to solve

Many social feeds maximize engagement and end up silencing disagreement. Outrage spreads fastest; bubbles and echo chambers accelerate division.

Pitting “for vs against” is the core obstacle to consensus. We need places and tools that reveal common ground and help everyone find a sentence they can nod to.

A path forward: broad listening

In Plurality, Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl describe broad listening as the inverse of broadcasting—aggregating and visualizing many voices with AI.

Pol.is powered vTaiwan to find 95% cross-group agreement on Uber regulation in weeks. In Japan, similar practice spread from the 2024 Tokyo governor race through GovTech Tokyo and Digital Democracy 2030.

Why the name

Prince Shotoku is said to have listened to ten people at once and ruled fairly—exactly the ideal broad listening pursues today. “Shotoku 2.0” signals scaling that ideal with technology.

Five design principles

  1. Map terrain, not trench warfare—show clusters and overlaps, not only which side is bigger.
  2. Score consensus, not headcounts—rank statements every cluster can accept; majorities cannot steamroll.
  3. Discuss proposals, not people—short, single-point posts make ad hominem structurally harder.
  4. Opinion maps and agreement scores—a broad-listening space where every stance is visible.
  5. Show the whole process—votes, clusters, and scores are inspectable. Transparency builds trust.

Three audience scopes

Shotoku 2.0 runs as a Social9 app and as a public site. Each topic picks one of three scopes.

  • Public: anyone can read; voting/posting needs Social9 or verified email.
  • Organization-only: only members of a chosen Social9 organization can view and vote.
  • Group-only: visible only to members of a selected group chat on Social9.

References and prior art

Contact

For pilots in government, companies, or communities—or to collaborate—please contact Social9, Inc.

Social9, Inc. website (product: Social9) to contact us.

Privacy and operations

Shotoku 2.0 is operated by Social9, Inc. and follows the Social9 product privacy policy. Votes are used only for aggregation and are not published in personally identifiable form. Further policies will be published over time.