Plural Technology Collaboratory
Overview
The Plural Technology Collaboratory is a Microsoft Research Special Project dedicated to advancing Plural Technologies (PTs), ones that support diverse communities and empower collaboration across them.
The PTC is motivated by the rapid recent advances in digital technologies, especially generative models, virtual reality and blockchains. They have the capacity to reshape and disrupt most of our society, including the religion, politics, economy, and culture. Harnessing these tools as an opportunity to extend pluralism in the face of this disruption will require fundamental sociotechnical change that we aim to develop technology to support.
Inspired by the pioneering work of Taiwan from 2014-2024 under the leadership of their 1st Digital Minister Audrey Tang (opens in new tab), PTC Research Lead E. Glen Weyl wrote on GitHub (opens in new tab) the world’s first fully open-source, democratically governed book, ⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (opens in new tab), harnessing plural technologies (opens in new tab) to govern the book through an open-source software project, GitRules (opens in new tab). The book became the first book on technology for a quarter century to be endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (opens in new tab) and was a Best-Seller in Japan (opens in new tab).
Weyl also Executive Produced a multi-award-winning short documentary about Tang’s life, “Good Enough Ancestor (opens in new tab)“, which Joseph Gordon-Levitt (opens in new tab) is now making into a full-length film. In recognition of the work documented by the book and film, Tang received the 2025 Right Livelihood Award (opens in new tab).
Our areas of impact
PTs have been deployed in a variety of social sectors by partners in collaboration with Microsoft Researchers.
Social media
Governance and politics
AI alignment
Our external collaborators
We are working closely with the following collaborators outside Microsoft, as well as a variety of internal groups:
