Community issue review: Crystallizing knowledge for encouraging civic engagement

Civic engagement in public decision-making requires that people form opinions or judgments based on the insights and knowledge around a public issue. Such knowledge is o.en not easily accessible by citizens because information about a policy issue tends to be sca.ered and buried in large and complex sources of potentially diluted and messy data. .is creates information barriers that prevent ordinary citizens from e.ectively participating in government issues. We present an approach to addressing this problem that involves crystallizing the bits and pieces of knowledge sca.ered in the data into a form of knowledge that is well-framed, compact, and trustworthy to the citizens. .is approach is articulated as a knowledge crystallization framework that specify the goals and processes of crystallizing policy knowledge. Following this framework, we present a concrete process, community issue review (CIR), that can be practiced as public decision analysis tools in a variety of community contexts. We implemented and used CIR in evaluating a real community proposal and observed the positive impact on the level of engagement. In the same time, we received feedback on how the CIR process and the supporting technology can be improved or be made more .exible to support best practices.