SoCS: Socio-Computational Systems to Support Public Engagement and Deliberation

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Public engagement and deliberation play key roles in democratic society. Yet, civic engagement is uneven at best, and thoughtful public deliberation about major issues is often displaced either by apathy or shrill and extreme voices. This project develops new ways for citizens and government to communicate using social-computational systems. The project develops systems that facilitate adding crisp, relatively neutral summaries alongside advocacy statements; jointly-authored position statements, with flexible ways to sign on to existing statements, fork new ones, and understand and track changes; and enhanced moderation techniques. A partnership with the City of Seattle is enabling the researchers to test their ideas and systems in actual use.The research studies a set of difficult and unsolved research issues in social-computational systems. How can systems support alternate divisions of labor among citizens and government, including effective support for automating some tasks and making the remaining tasks easy for human participants to work on? How can systems effectively support understanding a range of positions, and highlight who is agreeing or disagreeing and why? How can engagement systems allow and encourage effectively building on others' ideas and opinions? How can they handle strategic activity in which individuals or groups flood the system with duplicate posts, or create multiple accounts to give the impression of widespread support? How can input be effectively summarized and presented? The broader impacts of the work are substantial: if successful, this research will strengthen democratic process by facilitating effective citizen participation and deliberation.