Preconference: The Challenges and Promises of Participatory Policy-Making: Communication Practices, Design Aspects, and Sociotechnical Processes

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal

Abstract

The growth of online tools for civic engagement has ignited the imagination of researchers and practitioners of democratic participation. The internet has harbored a promise to disrupt the ways government interacts with its citizens through open data, provision of services or engagement of citizens in policy deliberation and crowdsourcing. Interactive, informed, and meaningful civic engagement in government decision-making processes has been viewed as the pinnacle of participatory government efforts. In the US, on his second day in the office, President Obama addressed senior staff and cabinet secretaries, urging them to “find new ways of tapping the knowledge and experience of ordinary Americans.” In Iceland, the government used crowdsourcing in drafting a new constitution. Locally, municipalities experiment with combining both online and offline methods to engage members of the public in participatory budgeting exercises.

There are a variety of activities that fit under the broad umbrella of civic engagement or e-participation in policy-making. Those range from purely consultative engagements such as virtual town halls, through policy ideation and crowdsourcing, to binding decision making such as participatory budgeting, rulemaking or the development of internet standards. While significant focus has been placed (in both research and practice) on technological solutions involved in effective online civic engagement in participatory and direct democracy activities, less attention has been paid to the systemic understanding of how these technological solutions interact with the social, political, institutional, and educational arrangements of such engagements and their potential to disrupt and alter traditional democratic practices. This pre-conference focuses on unpacking the black box of online civic engagement for planning and policy-making activities from a systemic perspective.

We invite competitive submissions of empirical analysis, case studies, and conceptual work that review the continuum of offline and online participation arrangements through a socio-technical systems lens—an interaction between human participants, institutional arrangements, and affordances of online participatory tools. We envision this workshop as a boundary searching—or boundary expanding—exercise that will tackle three major aspects of research of online civic engagement: conceptual and theoretical work for describing and analyzing the socio-technical nature of online participatory policy-making tools, methodological approaches to studying those phenomena with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and system design, and cases and datasets that invite and enable systemic analysis of both tools and social, political, institutional, and educational arrangements as they traverse both online and offline environments.

Sub Unit

• Sponsored Sessions

Chairs

• Brandie Nonnecke, U of California - Berkeley

• Tanja Katarina Aitamurto, Stanford

• Dmitry Epstein, University of Illinois at Chicago