Crystallizing local political knowledge for informed public participation

Guoray Cai, Feng Sun, Jessica Kropczynski

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Municipal governments often struggle to inform and engage citizens around local issues. Due to complexities of local politics and the diverse expressions in public and private spheres, citizens face a huge information barrier towards meaningful participation. To overcome such barrier, we explore a solution to provide citizens with clear, useful, and trustworthy information. We describe a framework for accomplishing this goal through issue-based knowledge crystallization. In order to put this framework into test, we devised Community Issue Review (CIR) as a concrete process for crystallizing local political knowledge. CIR is a structured deliberative process that use a citizen panel to conduct analysis of data relevant to a pending issue. We describe CIR in three aspects of its functions: institutional design, deliberative process, and productive outcome. Three special characteristics of CIR are emphasized: (1) fully embedded within local decision-making context; (2) hybrid (face-to-face and online) deliberation; (3) facilitation on collaborative decision-analysis. We present the iterative design of the CIR process and the lessons learned from field practices in a local community.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationElectronic Participation - 9th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, ePart 2017, Proceedings
EditorsOystein Saebo, Peter Parycek, Theresa A. Pardo, Yannis Charalabidis, Efthimios Tambouris, Andrei V. Chugunov, Panos Panagiotopoulos
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages53-64
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783319643212
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event9th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2017 - St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
Duration: Sep 4 2017Sep 7 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10429 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other9th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2017
Country/TerritoryRussian Federation
CitySt. Petersburg
Period9/4/179/7/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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