From Discussion to Direction
The challenge with online forums
Forums are great at letting people talk. They're less great at helping communities act on what's being said.
Traditional forums become archives of opinion—valuable in the moment, forgotten within weeks. Important threads get buried. Recurring concerns go unnoticed by decision-makers. And the people who could address issues often don't have time to sift through hundreds of posts to understand what their community actually cares about.
CanuckDUCK was built to solve this. Pond is where Canadians discuss. Consensus is where we measure agreement and make decisions. The Forum Analysis Engine is the bridge between them.
What FAE does
FAE is an AI-powered analysis system that reads Pond discussions and extracts meaning from the noise. It operates on three levels:
Sentiment Analysis Not just what people are talking about, but how they feel about it. Is the discussion frustrated? Hopeful? Divided? FAE tracks the emotional temperature of conversations to help identify where tensions exist and where common ground might be emerging.
Engagement Gravity Some topics generate a handful of thoughtful replies. Others spark ongoing, passionate debate across multiple threads. FAE measures this engagement gravity—identifying which issues are pulling community attention and which are fading into the background. High-gravity topics signal that something matters to people, even if they haven't explicitly said "this needs action."
Topic Clustering Discussions don't always stay neatly organized. A thread about transit might drift into housing affordability. A conversation about local events might surface concerns about accessibility. FAE identifies these emergent themes and clusters related discussions, even when they're scattered across different forums or threads.
The feedback loop: From Pond to Consensus
Here's where it gets interesting.
FAE doesn't just generate reports—it creates a feedback loop into Consensus, our structured decision-making platform.
When FAE identifies a high-gravity topic with strong sentiment but no clear resolution, it flags the issue as a potential candidate for a Consensus question. This means:
- Organic community discussions can evolve into formal questions
- Decision-makers see what their community is actually talking about, not just what's on the official agenda
- Citizens see that their forum participation leads somewhere—that talking about problems can lead to structured attempts to solve them
This isn't about replacing human judgment. Community moderators and administrators still decide which topics warrant formal Consensus questions. But FAE ensures those decisions are informed by the full breadth of community discussion, not just the loudest voices or the threads that happened to catch someone's attention.
Why this matters for civic engagement
Most civic participation tools ask people to respond to pre-determined questions. CanuckDUCK flips this: we let communities surface their own concerns through natural discussion, then provide the tools to formalize those concerns into actionable decisions.
FAE is the mechanism that makes this possible. It transforms Pond from a discussion board into a listening system—one that ensures community voices don't just echo into the void, but feed directly into the democratic processes that affect their lives.
Current availability
FAE is currently processing discussions for community association subscribers, with summaries generated via a queued system on Canadian infrastructure. Platform-wide analysis for broader Pond discussions is in development, with availability expanding as we scale resources.