Related papers: Deliberative Platform Design: The case study of th…
Trust and confidence in democratic institutions is at an all-time low. At the same time, many of the complex issues faced by city administrators and politicians remain unresolved. To tackle these concerns, many argue that citizens should,…
This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the…
Decide Madrid is the civic technology of Madrid City Council which allows users to create and support online petitions. Despite the initial success, the platform is encountering problems with the growth of petition signing because petitions…
With the ubiquity of Internet technologies and growing demands for transparency and open data policies, the role of social networking and online deliberation tools for public engagement in decision-making has increased substantially in the…
In this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
There has been rapidly growing interest in studying and designing online deliberative processes and technologies. This SIG aims at providing a venue for continuous and constructive dialogue between social, political and cognitive sciences…
We have created a platform for online deliberation called Deme (which rhymes with 'team'). Deme is designed to allow groups of people to engage in collaborative drafting, focused discussion, and decision making using the Internet. The Deme…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
How can we capture the dynamics of deliberation in a debate? In an increasingly divided and misinformed world, understanding the relationship between who is arguing and what they are arguing about is becoming critical for fostering a…
Online comments significantly influence users' judgments, yet their presentation, often determined by platform algorithms, can introduce biases, such as anchoring effects, which distort reasoning. While existing research emphasizes…
We study a setting in which a community wishes to identify a strongly supported proposal from a space of alternatives, in order to change the status quo. We describe a deliberation process in which agents dynamically form coalitions around…
Designers of online deliberative platforms aim to counter the degrading quality of online debates. Support technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing open avenues for widening the circle of people involved in…
Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a thorough discussion and…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) has evolved into a key democratic instrument for resource allocation in cities. Enabled by digital platforms, cities now have the opportunity to let citizens directly propose and vote on urban projects, using…
This report first provides a brief review of various forms of dialogue-based participation, e.g., Citizen Assembly, Citizen Lottery, Citizen Jury, Deliberative Polling, and Participatory Budgeting. Challenges associated with these…
Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Online discussion platforms are a vital part of the public discourse in a deliberative democracy. However, how to interpret the outcomes of the discussions on these platforms is often unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel and…