Engaging citizens in complex policy decisions

I'm a research scientist at the Generation Lab, research affiliate at the Deliberative Democracy Lab in the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and a member of the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team. My research focuses on developing online technology and methods for decision makers to better engage residents in their decision processes.  

I'm a project lead of the Self-Moderating Platform for Online Deliberation, an online video chat platform that can scale small-group conversations with a structured agenda, and the Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform. In 2023 I received my PhD in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, where I studied with my advisor Ashish Goel. From 2023-2025 I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab with professor Jim Fishkin.

Over the course of many years, I have been an active contributor and volunteer in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia community, and served in various roles. I was one of the founders and a core organizer of the photography competition Wiki Loves Monuments, and was named the 2021 Wikimedia Laureate.

Some Updates

This is a list of some personal updates. This does not include all the deliberations that our lab organized that I worked on (see stanforddeliberate.org and deliberation.stanford.edu for a selection), it only includes a selection of my Wikimedia updates. For a full overview of publications and working papers, see the research page.

• Jul 2026: I will attend Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France [attend]  [Wikimedia] 

• Jun 2026: I attend the PublicSpaces conferenc in Amsterdam [attend] 

• May 2026: I attend the NL Governance Conference Wikipedia in Amsterdam [attend]  [Wikimedia] 

• May 2026: I attend the BRIDGES AI symposium and workshop and hosted a discussion table at the University of London, UK [attend]  [Wikimedia] 

• Apr 2026: I attend Weavecamp at MindLabs, Tilburg University [attend] 

• Apr 2026: Soham present our paper "Question the Questions: Auditing Representation in Online Deliberative Processes" at the Web Conference 2026 (joint work with Soham De, Ashish Goel, Smitha Milli, Ariel Procaccia and Alice Siu) [publication] 

• Feb 2026: I present at the Google DeepMind Information Quality Talk Series (online, internal). [attend] [presentation] 

• Feb 2026: We publish a technical report on a 2025 mini-public in Nepal. [publication] 

• Jan 2026: I attend the Wikimedia Futures Lab workshop in Frankfurt, Germany. [attend] [Wikimedia] 

• Jan 2026: We publish a preprint of our working paper "Beyond Polarization: Opinion Mixing and Social Influence in Deliberation" on ArXiv. [publication] 

• Jan 2025: Wikipedia turns 25 years! This is an exciting milestone, in a time that the knowledge ecosystem is under pressure from governments, shifting consumer patterns and AI developments. I was interviewed by the Dutch national newspaper Trouw together with Wikimedia NL director Cristina Fodor, resulting in: "Wikipedia is 25 jaar. Gaat de encyclopedie ten onder aan haar eigen succes?" [Wikimedia] 

See the Longer List of Updates for older updates...