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.

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

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

• 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. [Wikimedia] 

• Nov 2025: We publish a preprint of our working paper "Question the Questions: Auditing Representation in Online Deliberative Processes"  on ArXiv. [publication] 

• Oct 2025: I attend the Democracy R&D Conference on 14 - 17 October in Brussels, Belgium.  I presented the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform at the associated DelibTech Network meeting. [attend] [presentation] 

• Oct 2025: I attend the Digital Democracy The Hague conference by Polis NL on 9 and 10 October in The Hague, the Netherlands. [attend]

• Sep 2025: I present one working paper on gender dynamics in the 2023 Meta Community Forum and am co-author of 3 other papers (experiment in Nepal; deliberative disengagement; and experiment in Finland) presented at the annual meeting of APSA in Vancouver, Canada. [attend] [presentation] 

• Sep 2025: I start a new position at Generation Lab, and moved (back) to the Netherlands. As part of my work, I remain a project lead for the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform. [personal update] 

• Sep 2025: I give 2 guest lectures on Societal Decision Making Online and Online Deliberation at Stanford's Sophomore College - Artificial Intelligence and Democracy. [teaching] 

• Aug 2025: I organize several sessions at and attend Wikimania, the international Wikimedia Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. [attend] [Wikimedia] [presentation] 

• May 2025: I present a new working paper on gender dynamics in the 2023 Meta Community Forum at the annual conference of the World Association on Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) in St.Louis MO (joint work with Alexandra Cirone and Estelle Ciesla). [attend] [presentation] 

• Apr 2025: I present a new working paper based on my work on Participatory Budgeting voting methods as a lightning talk at the 82nd Annual Midwest Political Science Association Conference, Chicago IL (joint work with Ashish Goel). [attend] [presentation] 

• Mar 2025: I am elected Chair of the Wikimania Steering Committee (Wikimania is the worldwide annual conference of the Wikimedia movement).  [personal update] [Wikimedia] 

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