Online participation: the Woodberry Down experiment

The internet and world wide web are generating radical changes in the way we are able tocommunicate. Our ability to engage communities and individuals in designing theirenvironment is also beginning to change as new digital media provide ways in whichindividuals and groups can interact with planners and politicians in exploring their future.This paper tells the story of how the residents of one of the most disadvantagedcommunities in Britain ? the Woodberry Down Estate in the London borough ofHackney ? have begun to use an online system which delivers everything from routineservices about their housing to ideas about options for their future. Woodberry Down isone of the biggest regeneration projects in Western Europe. It will take at least 10 years,probably much longer, to complete, at a cost of over £150 million. Online participation isone of the many ways in which this community is being engaged but as we will show, itis beginning to act as a catalyst. The kinds of networks which are evolving aroundsystems like these will change the nature of participation itself, the ways we need to thinkabout it, and the ways we need to respond. Before the experiment is described, we set thecontext by describing the wide range of digital media for communicating plans andplanning which suggests a new typology for web participation consistent with this fastemerging network culture

Encouraging Online Participation

Online discussion forums are an excellent environment for peer and collaborative learning. Online discussion forums may be used to support out-of-class interaction in traditional on-campus education, or become the virtual classroom in a subject (or course) that is taught entirely online. However, one of the problems often encountered with online discussion forums is that they can suffer from a lack of student participation. This paper provides instructors with a number of guidelines for encouraging student participation in online discussion forums

Online learning in the workplace: a hybrid model of participation in networked, professional learning

The design and conceptualisation of online learning environments for work-related, professional learning was addressed through research with users of an online environment for social workers. The core questions for the research were to identify the nature of participation in the online environment, the relationship between online participation and the offline context, and the implications for conceptualisation of online learning environments to support work-related learning. Key areas of the research literature in technology-enhanced and work related learning are discussed in order to position the study, to inform the research methods used and interpretation of the findings. Online participation needs to be understood as a hybrid concept, in that it is a reflection of offline roles, opportunities and pressures, as well as the usefulness, usability and relevance of what is online. Online participation was diverse, from short browsing for information to more reflective engagement that supported movement across the boundaries between roles and areas of work practice and a focus on practice skills and underlying values. Online sites intended to support work-related learning should start from the perspective of the socio-technical interaction network, with its emphasis on building in the social context at all stages in the life of a site

Online participation in digital classroom

Short paperOnline participation in digital classrooms is a common feature in many educational institutes. This research explores working adult learners’ perceptions with regard to the use of asynchronous online discussion (AOD). Findings suggest that participants on the whole were receptive to the use of AOD. Moreover, findings also suggest that many working adults preferred instructor to peer facilitation, and participants desired to receive a response from other participants within 24 hours. However, a clearer guidance on how AOD participation is assessed is needed. Participants suggested two possible areas by which online participation may be assessed: (a) the number of thread (e.g., participation rate, frequency of log-in and number of posts viewed), and (b) the content of discussion such as the demonstration of knowledge on topic taught, depth of discussion, content of discussion, relevancy of post, quality of comments, usefulness and constructive of the post.published_or_final_versio

Online learning and fun with databases

In this paper, we explore how online learning can support face-to-face teaching in fundamental database theory and the contributions it can make towards motivating and enhancing the student learning experience. We show how we have used WebCT for a third level database module and present student feedback to our approach. While online participation is high overall, motivation for self-learning is increased by the use of self-assessment exercises and summative assessment was also considered to be more fun online than using paper based equivalents. Evidence exists to link greater online participation of course materials to improved performance. We complement our feedback by presenting and discussing a number of software tools which help students practice important methods in database systems, including SQL. After evaluating these against known methods for improving student motivation, we suggest ideas for further development of more game-like learning tools

Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government\u27s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution [24, 1, 18, 14] for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in live Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically signifcant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result

Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government\u27s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution [24, 1, 18, 14] for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in live Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically signifcant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result

Engagement of politicians and citizens in the cyber campaign on Facebook: a comparative analysis between Mexico and Spain

Producción CientíficaThis study explores the use of Facebook by political actors in election campaigns, establishing the extent to which candidates, parties and citizens engaged in online participation through different online tools provided by this social networking site. A comparative content analysis of the Facebook pages of the main candidacies in the election campaigns in Spain (Castilla y León) and Mexico (Nuevo León) in 2015 was carried out. The results reveal a positive relationship between types of engagement, especially in the Mexican campaign, where politicians and users score systematically higher in all variables measuring engagement. However, results also indicate that the citizen engagement was of higher quality/ intensity in the Spanish campaign

Towards a Requirement Framework for Online Participation Platforms

Online participation platforms (OPPs) are frequently used by public institutions to involve citizens in political opinion forming and decision making. A literature re-view reveals different approaches to evaluate these OPPs. These approaches focus only on partial requirements of participation processes. In this research in progress, we develop and pretest an interdisciplinary literature-based requirement frame-work. It includes the categories usability, security, information, transparency, inte-gration, and mobilisation. Our aim is to close the research gap of a context-specific analysis and evaluation of OPPs