CHS: Small: Tools and Techniques for Supporting the Urban Public

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This project uses a comprehensive set of empirical and design-based methods to strengthen our scientific understanding of technology-mediated practices that bridge local community engagement and administration. This research will result in empirical insights and novel software systems that will guide the design of practical, scalable, and usable technologies that connect community-based participation with policy making and local governance. It will also provide an empirical basis for understanding how new forms of deliberation and management can be integrated into practices and procedures designed to engender accountability and broad access to policy development and local government. The research will contribute to the design of cyber-human systems that support digital democracy through the design of technology to mediate interaction with constituents in order to enable broad participation, and integrating robust communication tools into daily work practices to facilitate a more effective and efficient workplace.The specific steps of the research are to: 1. Develop qualitative insight into the cooperative work practices of urban policy making, paying particular attention to information sharing and sense-making practices in both the community at large and members of local government. 2. Develop experimental interfaces to support information sharing and sense-making derived from the qualitative insights of cooperative work practices and evaluate and compare these interfaces over iterative deployments. 3. Develop a design framework for computer-supported community engagement and validate the design framework through summative evaluation. Understanding how to design systems for community engagement that incorporate cooperative work practices with novel forms of data production, new modes of community participation, and innovations in cooperative work has direct implications for complementing the goals of digital democracy, but also for participation in scientific, medical, educational and other domains where the integration of broad public involvement through crowdsourcing and citizen-based initiatives is driving innovation.