The overarching goals of this work are to understand and to provide socio-computational support for improving the entire cycle of technology-enabled civic engagement: (1) recruitment of people with a stake in the issues; (2) deliberative discussion in which they learn about the policy issues, engage with each other, voice questions and recount experiences; and (3) consensus building in which participants move toward collaborative content-creation, summarization of the knowledge that has emerged in discussion and the development of agreement around key points. In practice, efforts to use social media for citizen policy consultations often fell far short of their knowledge-generating and democracy-reinforcing goals. There thus is a crucial need to discover how to design civic engagement spaces that leverage the potential of social media, so that they support not simply more participation but rather better participation that will benefit both the policymakers seeking input and the citizens who participate in the discussion.
To achieve this goal, the project integrates computer science research on natural language learning for social-computational systems, human-computer interaction research on online communities, social media design, and social science research on motivation and individual and group deliberative processes. The research will advance behavioral science understanding of the relationship between individual characteristics and successful e-deliberation; the communicative processes that characterize successful e-deliberation; and the group processes and moderator behaviors that promote a shift from open discussion to consensus building. It will advance the state-of-the-art in natural language processing by developing joint human-computer text analysis techniques to (1) promote on-line civic engagement in policy discussions and (2) facilitate deliberative moderation in this collaborative online setting. It will add to human-computer interaction by advancing recommender systems, online communities, and social media research to support mentoring activities and engagement with alternate points of view. Finally, it will extend scientific understanding of how to motivate and support broader, better citizen participation in public policymaking.
The work will have at least five broader impacts: (1) increase understanding of, and infrastructure for, e-participation in policy-making, and provide annotated datasets of civic deliberations for use by other researchers; (2) enhance education through graduate and undergraduate mentoring and development of a new interdisciplinary course on Online Civic Engagement; (3) promote STEM education diversity with programs for middle and high school girls; (4) provide community and government outreach activities; (5) benefit society by improved civic engagement in policymaking in general.
