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

公众参与和审议在民主社会中发挥着关键作用。然而，公民参与充其量也是参差不齐的，公众对重大问题的深思熟虑往往被冷漠或尖锐和极端的声音所取代。该项目开发了公民和政府使用社会计算系统进行交流的新方法。该项目开发的系统有助于在宣传声明之外添加清晰、相对中立的摘要；共同撰写的立场声明，以灵活的方式签署现有声明、派生新的声明，并了解和跟踪变化；以及增强的缓和技术。与西雅图市的合作使研究人员能够在实际使用中测试他们的想法和系统。这项研究研究了一系列社会计算系统中的困难和未解决的研究问题。系统如何支持公民和政府之间的交替分工，包括有效地支持一些任务的自动化，并使剩余的任务便于人类参与者处理？系统如何有效地支持对一系列立场的理解，并强调谁同意或不同意以及为什么？参与系统如何才能允许和鼓励有效地建立在他人的想法和观点之上？他们如何处理个人或团体在系统中大量发布重复帖子的战略活动，或者创建多个账户以给人以广泛支持的印象？如何有效地总结和展示输入内容？这项工作的更广泛影响是巨大的：如果成功，这项研究将通过促进公民的有效参与和审议来加强民主进程。

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.