Digital Deliberation: Searching and Deciding About How to Vote

相当数量的政治活动正在转移到互联网上。这包括候选人、政党、问题倡导者、竞选活动、政府、新闻和舆论媒体以及针对公民和潜在选民的个人的信息传播。它还包括公民积极参与由博客、意见论坛、讨论小组等社交软件调解的互动数字环境。虽然主要使用调查方法对这一运动的大规模人口统计进行了大量研究，但很少使用实验和观察方法对参与数字民主的个人进行近距离研究。也缺乏支持设计软件界面以支持数字民主的经验性用户研究。在这个项目中，人们将在使用数字材料做出投票决定时受到密切观察。在模拟投票活动中，使用真实在线材料进行的一系列实证研究将考察这一领域的用户行为。研究问题包括人们用来理解政治信息的概念范畴、浏览和决策策略以及个性化。另一组研究将考察数字信息的更多社交用途。问题包括与他人共享个人资料信息、注释和意见的兴趣，共享信息对决策的影响，以及隐私和信息共享的相互作用。所有研究都将比较来自不同背景和情况的参与者。在实证研究中收集的信息将被用来帮助设计一个选民信息门户，该门户为公民组织政治信息，并帮助他们做出决定。该门户将使用常用搜索引擎找到的互联网信息，并允许选民将其重组为以用户为中心的类别，对其进行注释，并将其共享。在这一背景下，我们将研究隐私和道德问题。智力价值该项目的智力价值包括发展对人们希望如何使用和确实使用新兴技术的理解，以便在公民和政府活动的背景下学习、记忆、推理和做出决定。影响该提案有非常广泛的影响，因为由此产生的系统可以影响许多背景和情况的公民，并可供政府、私人组织和学术机构的开发人员和实施决策者使用。该项目的教育目标包括制作数字政府系统，鼓励公民学习公民问题。让数字政府为所有公民服务的目标，特别关注公平和数字鸿沟问题，解决了多样性目标。

A considerable amount of political activity is moving onto the Internet. This includes information dissemination by candidates, parties, issue advocates, campaigns, governments, news and opinion media, and individuals which is directed at citizens and potential voters. It also includes active participation by citizens in interactive digital environments mediated by social software such as blogs, opinion forums, discussion groups, etc. While there has been considerable study of the large scale demographics of this movement primarily using survey methods, there have been few close up studies of individuals involved in digital democracy using experimental and observational methods. There has also been a lack of empirical user studies in support of the design of software interfaces to support digital democracy. In this project, people will be observed closely as they use digital materials to make voting decisions. A series of empirical studies using real online materials in mock voting exercises will examine user behavior in this domain. Study issues include the conceptual categories that people use to understand political information, browsing and decision making strategies, and personalization. Another set of studies will examine more social uses of digital information. Questions include interest in sharing profile information, annotations, and opinions with others,impact of shared information on decision making, and the interaction of privacy and information sharing. All studies will compare participants from diverse backgrounds and situations. Information gathered in the empirical studies will be used to help design a Voter Information Portal that organizes political information for citizens and helps them make decisions. The portal would use Internet information found by commonly-used search engines and allow voters to reorganize it into user-centered categories, annotate it, and share it. Issues of privacy and ethics in this context will be examined.Intellectual MeritThe intellectual merit of the project involves the development of an understanding of how people wish to use, and do use, emerging technologies to learn, remember, reason about, and make decisions in the context of civic and government activities. ImpactThere is very broad impact of the proposal in that resulting systems couldinfluence citizens of many backgrounds and circumstances, and can be utilized by developers and implementation decision makers ingovernments, private organizations, and academic settings. The educational goals of the project include the production of digital government systems that encourage learning about civic issues by citizens. The goal of making digital government work for all citizens, with specific attention to issues of equity and the digital divide, addresses diversity goals.