BG 2050: Community input sought to shape next 25 years

Published 1:18 pm Monday, February 17, 2025

By David Horowitz

BY DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

Western Kentucky University’s E.A. Diddle Arena did not succumb to a sinkhole last week – despite 20,000 copies of the Daily News stating and illustrating so Monday.

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Rather, the Feb. 17 special edition featured 12 pages of speculative fiction set in 2050.

Volunteers donning sandwich boards handed out free copies of the Daily News. Papers were delivered across neighborhoods regionwide. Local radio hosts Tony Rose and Slim Nash provided audio coverage of 2050 “news.”

All this, to provoke thought about the future and kick off a one-month long community input-gathering initiative unlike any in county history – one expected to guide the leaders and decision-makers across the greater Bowling Green-Warren County area through the next 25 years.

“It’s a little bit of a cross between April Fools and H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds,’ ” Daily News Publisher Joe Imel said of the special edition. “I’m hopeful that (audiences) will read (…) our version of the future, things that might happen, and that prompts them to want to take part in this and say, ‘This is what I think the future looks like – this is what I think the future should be for us, for Bowling Green and Warren County.’ ”

The special edition – courtesy of Daily News staff, Bowling Green High School journalists and local writers – is part of an outreach campaign soliciting community input through March 17 at whatcouldbgbe.com.

Adults who live, work, play or stay in the greater region are invited to anonymously submit ideas about what they hope to see in the area through 2050 and to vote “yes,” “no” or “pass/unsure” on others’ ideas.

Participation from this initiative, “What Could BG Be?”, feeds into a larger project expected to influence decision-making over the next 25 years: BG 2050.

“Everybody who lives here and who is interested in staying here or (is) interested in seeing their kids, their grandkids, their nieces, their nephews, people they care about, continue to thrive here, should have a vested interest in this conversation,” said Sam Ford, cofounder of Innovation Engine, the strategy firm that has overseen the website and helped facilitate the initiative.

Input will be distilled into summarized findings, reviewed by local leaders and stakeholders, released to the public and incorporated into a broader planning document for the next 25 years – “a community-involvement plan that decision-makers can take a look at and will help them make decisions on the direction of the community,” Warren County Judge-Executive Doug Gorman said.

He hopes much will be completed by 2025’s end.

Warren County is projected to become home to more than 200,000 residents by 2050. When Gorman ran for judge-executive nearly three years ago, he knew there was no stopping that growth – and conceived the idea to plan for it.

It began with a summer 2023 all-day workshop organized on the county’s behalf to imagine the future of the city and county. It drew insights from around 40 local stakeholders, alongside individuals with backgrounds in storytelling and imagination, Ford said.

Notably, it identified eight “pillar” areas where the stakeholders, depending on their backgrounds, have been sorted into to inform the final report: talent development, public health, housing, infrastructure, storytelling, quality of life, tourism and economic development.

A report on that workshop prompted several months of brainstorming, and last spring, it led to the launch of what would become BG 2050: a partnership among Warren County, the nonprofit Computational Democracy Project, the Google division Jigsaw, and more than 100 community leaders and stakeholders, with collaboration overseen by Innovation Engine and Sangita Shresthova, director of research at the University of Southern California-based Civic Imagination Project.

“If that growth is coming, we need to get in front of it and make every effort to grow in a way that we can have the kind of community we want,” Gorman said. “What I like to say is, your last name doesn’t matter in this community – it’s not an indicator of your success. Hard work and kindness, and things like this, are really what makes a big difference for the success of people in the community … I think we want things to continue that way – not go 25 years from now and not recognize our community.”

Under the hood

Two entities are utilizing their tech to glean consensus from the vast swathes of input expected at whatcouldbgbe.com.

There’s the Computational Democracy Project, which utilizes a technology called Polis to solicit and analyze data through whatcouldbgbe.com, which is akin to a community-wide online conversation. Then, there’s Jigsaw, which is piloting AI that aims to make sense of that broad conversation for participants and area decision-makers.

“One of the bottlenecks of Polis is you get thousands and thousands of lines of text – and it’s a really painful, laborious, sometimes costly task for a human facilitator to do,” said Darshana Narayanan, who has managed the project on the ground as a founding member of the Computational Democracy Project. “Now, with large language models arriving, (…) we have been working (with Jigsaw) to just basically churn through that text at speeds that humans absolutely cannot match.”

The pillar groups participated in a pilot of these technologies late last year, and whatcouldbgbe.com used statements from them as a foundation for its Feb. 14 launch.

New statements are checked by volunteer moderators and affirmed by those at Innovation Engine mainly to filter out redundant statements and personal information, Ford said.

Using browser language detection, submitted statements are translated in real time by Google Translate, Narayanan said; the Polis interface has been manually translated into the nine most popular languages used in county 911 calls.

The website is designed for visitors to participate through the same device – preventing them from seeing statements they’ve already voted on.

The top factor that determines how much priority a statement gets is how new it is, Narayanan said. That way, statements that are added later in the one-month period are given more of a chance to gather feedback.

Polis places people who vote at least seven times into opinion groups broadly based on what they agree and disagree on, Narayanan said. An algorithm picks up opinions and perspectives that bridge across these divides, where it finds opinions “that bridge across otherwise polarized perspectives or groups of people,” she said.

“It’s a nice mix between a focus group and a survey,” Narayanan said. “It’s a free-flowing conversation, but it’s bite sized, and you get to weigh in on what other people say and add your own statement, which allows real-time quantification (…) with potentially many thousands of people participating.”

Jigsaw, meanwhile, notes where there’s unusually high convergence or divergence of opinion, Jigsaw Managing Director Scott Carpenter said.

Its AI summarizes feedback to generate summary findings. These findings are automatically categorized across the pillar groups, and they can be further broken down into subcategories if desired.

Each finding will be grounded in individuals’ original comments submitted online. These connected comments, or footnotes, will be made visible, enhancing granularity and transparency by allowing people to check that the statements are derived accurately from users’ submissions, according to Carpenter.

The data will also become available to the public shortly after March 17 and analyzed throughout the remainder of the year, Ford said.

Jigsaw’s findings will be available to the heads of the pillar groups, who will then review the data, make sense of the findings, highlight what they deem most pertinent and use to inform their insights; that will be submitted to the county later in the year.

Warren County, Innovation Engine and Shresthova will draw on those insights to work on the final vision document.

“We’ll get input and results from this that’ll help direct us in some of our future planning … It might take us 20-25 years to accomplish something that’s in here – but if we waited 25 years to start trying to accomplish that plan, there’s no way we would be successful,” Gorman said. “ … What we will do is take a look very hard at every prospect that has a great majority of the people that want to do that, and take a look to see how we can craft, maybe, that future from these results.”

Added Bowling Green Mayor Todd Alcott, “We stand united with this information, and (we’ll) work together on how we’re going to evolve and take this information and make a great community.”

Diversity, follow-through needed

Soliciting input from a diversity of backgrounds – both ideas and votes in support or against them – is the main aim of the ongoing campaign. Diversity of participants, Narayanan said, is even more important than the number.

“My biggest concern is to get the word out to as many parts of the region as possible,” Ford said.

It’s largely entailed grassroots outreach that has centered the distribution of physical materials regionwide through multitudes of organizations: government institutions, nonprofits, high education institutions, the Barren River Area Development District, the regional health department, faith-based organizations and so on. Many of these are listening partners – people from various organizations listed on the website that have committed to accounting for the data, Ford said.

“We’ve thrown up the flag and said, ‘We’ve got all these materials – tell us what you need,’ and they’ve committed to helping us get the word out,” Ford said. “We’ve got a digital kit. We’ve got physical materials. We’ve got materials in other languages.”

The Warren County Public Library, for instance, has been especially involved in the outreach, Ford said. It’s sharing information about the campaign across all library locations and its outreach initiatives such as the Little Free Shuttle and Feed and Read mobile library, which bring the survey directly to community members, WCPL Executive Program Manager Laura Beth Fox-Ezell said.

“The heart of this campaign is about trying to go to where people already gather,” Innovation Engine Cofounder Amanda Havard said.

Narayanan described the collaboration as “the most inclusive, community-driven, and imaginative outreach effort I’ve seen (…) running Polis conversations around the world” for the past seven years.

Imel stressed his belief that everyone should have a voice in how the community moves forward.

“I firmly believe that (…) the people that run city and county government need to be able to know that they’re hearing from everybody – from across all races, creeds, colors, socio-economic brackets,” Imel said. “All of this information will be presented to (city and county government) in a way that’s easily digestible, that generates consensus and cuts out the noise from the screamers.

But they have to take this information and do something good with it, do something right for Bowling Green, and I know they will … I feel in my heart that ultimately, there’s going to come a plan out of this that’s going to be beneficial to everybody … But this project is what brings everybody together – I hope.”

The technologies featured in BG 2050 are open source, meaning they’re freely available to the public. Polis, of The Computational Democracy Project, is available at https://github.com/compdemocracy. Jigsaw’s sense-making tools are accessible at https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/sensemaking-tools.

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Horowitz reports for the Daily News through a partnership with Report for America.

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