NISHIO Hirokazu
[home] [日本語版]Broad Listening in Practice
"Broad listening" is the counterpart of "broadcasting." Where broadcasting is the ability of one person to speak to millions, broad listening is the ability to hear from millions of people and synthesize their voices into a shared, collective voice (a formulation due to researcher Andrew Trask). Combine the two, and a single person can hold a conversation with millions.
Why I work on this
I first encountered the concept in April 2023, through a draft of the book Plurality. From my notes at the time:
My interest is in improving human intellectual productivity. Broad listening is a technology that makes possible what no unaided human can do — listening to the opinions of a great many people. So I am interested in it as a form of human augmentation.
The through-line of my work, from Coding o Sasaeru Gijutsu (2013, Japanese) to The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge (2018; the English translation is free to read online), has been augmenting intellectual productivity. Broad listening extends that same line: from augmenting an individual's knowledge work to augmenting our capacity to understand one another. A longer conceptual writeup is on my Scrapbox: "Broad listening: a technology that lets everyone be Prince Shōtoku" (Japanese).
Record of practice
- April 2023: Encountered broad listening through the Plurality draft
- August 2023: Contributed "Not subjective vs. objective — from one person's subjectivity to the subjectivity of many" (Japanese) to the ChatGPT special issue of the IPSJ magazine Joho Shori (Vol.64, No.9). Its diagram, released under CC0, has since been widely reused to explain broad listening
- July 2024: 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election (Japanese) — practiced broad listening in Takahiro Anno's campaign
- September 2024: Broad listening inside Cybozu (Japanese) — a corporate-culture workshop with 100 managers, visualizing kintone-recorded discussions with Talk to the City; an application beyond mass politics
- October 2024: JAPAN CHOICE "Yoron Chizu" (public opinion map) — helped build an opinion-mapping service for the 2024 general election (released October 18)
- November 2024 – January 2025: Shin Tokyo 2050 (Japanese) — applied AI broad listening to the public call for input on Tokyo's long-term strategy, together with Takahiro Anno (final analysis published January 31, 2025)
- 2025–present: Digital Democracy 2030 (DD2030) — developing Kouchou-AI and Idobata
- May 2025: Led the Japanese localization of PLURALITY, published by Cybozu-shiki Books
- July 2025: 2025 House of Councillors election (Japanese) — broad listening with Kouchou-AI
- September 2026 (forthcoming): Co-authoring Broad Listening: Across Politics, Local Government, and Business (in Japanese)
Tools (open source)
- Kouchou-AI — a broad listening tool that collects, structures, and visualizes opinions at scale
- Idobata — a platform for exchanging and deliberating opinions on policy
Read more
- Plurality (book) — source & contributions (English)
- Scrapbox pages on broad listening — working notes, continuously updated (Japanese)
- note — articles for a general audience (Japanese)
Related stories: Plurality / Intellectual Production