Government and Civic · Ordinary People
Doug Gorman turned 8,000 strangers' ideas into a plan for his county
Bowling Green, Kentucky
Warren County's judge executive replaced a 23-person town hall with an online experiment that let nearly 8,000 residents vote a million times on what Bowling Green, Kentucky should become.
The person and the place
Doug Gorman is the Warren County Judge Executive in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city adding a population the size of itself over the next 25 years.
The problem he cared about
a normal town hall on growth issues draws about 23 people, evenly split for and against, nowhere near enough to represent a county about to commit to decisions on housing, schools, and healthcare through 2050.
The agency moment
Gorman's office opened an anonymous online idea board called "What Could BG Be?," then brought in Google Jigsaw's Sensemaker, an AI tool built to read thousands of open-ended answers and find where strangers actually agree, as the tool's first large-scale test at government scale.
What changed, with evidence
over 33 days, nearly 8,000 residents, about one in ten Bowling Green residents, cast more than a million votes on each other's ideas. Stripped of names and politics, the responses landed on 80 percent agreement across more than half the proposals, and a report that would have taken county staff days or weeks to compile came back in minutes. "What we just conducted was the largest town hall in America," Gorman said.
The move worth copying
Gorman didn't wait for a bigger budget or a room big enough to hold everyone. He opened a website, let the county tell him what it wanted, and used AI to actually hear all of them at once. If your town's next planning meeting is heading for the same 23 chairs, point whoever runs it at Bowling Green.
"And what we just conducted was the largest town hall in America." — Doug Gorman, PBS News Hour
Sources
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