Esterling TECD lab homepage
Citation
Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab), UC Riverside. “The Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab).” Website homepage, publication date unknown. https://tecd-lab.ucr.edu/. Read 2026-10-26.
Bottom line
- Kevin Michael Esterling’s lab at UC Riverside, the TeCD-Lab, started in 2019. It builds “communication technology that makes democracy more robust, responsive and resilient.”
- Its main project is Prytaneum, an open source webinar platform for large public meetings.
Background
The homepage describes the lab, its main project and news items. The lab joins the UCR School of Public Policy and the UCR Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Key claims
- “Founded in 2019, the TeCD-Lab aims to design and develop communication technology that makes democracy more robust, responsive and resilient.” (top)
- Prytaneum is “an open source webinar platform designed to make synchronous, speaker-led meetings more constructive, more inclusive, and more informative.” (Prytaneum section)
- Prytaneum “uniquely solves the problem of “many-to-one” communication, which occurs whenever a speaker wishes to understand the perspectives an audience during a synchronous meeting.” (top)
- News lists the Nature article “Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter” and three Brookings TechTank pieces on technology in Congress, 2020. (News)
Evidence and method
A lab homepage. It describes the lab’s own work.
Limits
- The page does not say where Prytaneum is in use. The expertise map says it was “piloted with a California commission”. This page does not confirm that.