**6. Conclusions and future work**

This publication introduces and discusses the HELIOSPHERE concept. The foundations are to support the democratic process by empowering debates, both offline and online. Moreover, the HELIOSPHERE presents a hybrid image in which offline (physical) and offline are blended. To support the discussion, three main dimensions are addressed: transparency, inclusiveness, fairness. To empower openness and fairness, an AI dashboard was presented, including an initial trial. The AI dashboards support both the participants and the moderators to balance the debate based on objective data related to sentiment and most debated topics. Concerning inclusiveness state of the art camera technology such as 360-degree cameras were introduced.

Concerning future work, all three areas, transparency, inclusiveness, and fairness, are to be extended towards the vision presented in the publication's introduction. Specifically, concerning transparency and fairness, the AI dashboard is being developed and tested towards speaker time detection, speaker gender detection, off-topic detection and bias detection. More advanced technological approaches are being tested concerning inclusiveness, such as avatar technology, to overcome the barrier between online and offline audiences. For HELIOSPHERE, it is essential that not only the online audience is to be included more in the debate via camera, voice and commenting technology but also that the offline (physical) audience are

### *A Theoretical Concept to Increase the Trustworthiness of Online and Offline… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98442*

more aware of the online audience, which is currently mainly an image or face on a screen. Using more advanced avatar representations makes it possible to bring the online audience closer to the experience within the space.

A further area that can be extended is to detect sentiment in debate and towards mentioned topics. This allows a moderator to 'take the heat out of a debate. On the flip side, a moderator can also be informed that the overall debate has slowed down too much and needs to be reignited. Features such as speaking time per gender and other balancing metrics are possible and can also be extended to more sophisticate areas such as bias and off-topic detection.

Finally, it has to be noted that the recent surge in sizeable real-time scale online debating platforms such as Clubhouse12 have become very popular and has reached over 10 M active users weekly13. Competitors such as Twitter and Facebook are rumoured to be developing alternative real-time debating platforms with the same premisses that the conversations are not recorded or post-analysed.

In conclusion, it can be stated that the introduction of the HELIOSPHERE concept forms a solid and foundational concept to blend complex online and offline communication, such as highly interactive debates, and with that support democracy as one of the foundations of society, which is democracy.
