ITR: Developing and Testing A High Telepresence Virtual Agora For Broad Citizen Participation: A Multi-Trait, Multi-Method Investigation

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EIA- 0205502Peter ShaneCarnegie Mellon U. ITR: Developing and Testing A High Telepresence Virtual Agora For Broad Citizen Participation: A Multi-Trait, Multi-Method InvestigationThis grant will support research related to citizen learning and participation in communities and government using Internet-based information technologies and tools. This is a multidisciplinary proposal with participants from Public Policy and Management, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Psychology and Computer Science. A variety of free software will be developed to foster collaborative information sharing, structured discussions and community decision-making through shared data, chat sessions, video conferencing and other information modes. The software is not an end in itself, but rather will serve to support research by the PIs addressing some of the well-known problems of computer-mediated communications, such as poor transmission of social cues, usability, accountability, and access inequalities. These problems will be studied within two larger contexts, Community Effects and Decisions Quality Effects, and two levels of physical community, on-campus, and off-campus (but still within the Pittsburgh local community). The software will be robustly built and intended for broad use beyond the project itself.