4/ Second is her development of @audreyt’s idea of “Uncommon Ground” into a method for identifying issues where the usual political camps lose their predictive power. Uncommon Ground goes beyond looking for consensus between opposing camps. Instead, it searches for questions that cut across the usual divide (in other words, issues on which people within each camp are themselves divided). Those cross-cutting disagreements may reveal possibilities for new coalitions that the dominant YIMBY–NIMBY framing obscures.

3/ For those working in computational democracy, it’s also worth highlighting two innovations @_paulaberman brought to the process. First is her design of “issue-native publics.” Start with people already deeply engaged in a contested issue (here, activists on both sides of Sydney’s density debate) rather than beginning only with a representative sample. Instead of treating highly engaged participants simply as a representativeness problem, issue-native publics treat their fluency in the debate as an asset: map the arguments with people who know the conflict from the inside, then test what emerges with a representative public.

1/ The YIMBY–NIMBY housing debate is one of the sharpest political pain points in cities today, and one where conventional consultation can take months/years while reproducing the same divisions. What makes this work by @RadxChange especially striking is the combination of speed and methodological innovation.