The Magic Sauce: Practices of Facilitation in Online Policy Deliberation

Online engagement in policy deliberation is one of the more complex aspects of open government. Previous research on human facilitation of policy deliberation has focused primarily on the citizens who need facilitation. In this paper we unpack the facilitation practices from the perspective of the moderator. We present an interview study of facilitators in RegulationRoom – an online policy deliberation platform. Our findings reveal that facilitators focus primarily on two broad activities: managing the stream of comments and interacting with comments and commenters – both aimed at obtaining high quality public input into the particular policymaking process. Managing the immediate goals of online policy deliberations, however, might overshadow long-term goals pf public deliberation, i.e. helping individuals develop participatory literacy beyond a single policy engagement. Our contribution is twofold: we unpack the practice of human facilitation in online policy deliberation, and suggest both design and process implications for sustainable growth of civic engagement environments beyond the individual case we analyze

Crowdsourcing Law and Policy: A Design-Thinking Approach to Crowd-Civic Systems

Crowdsourcing technologies, strategies and methods offer new opportunities for bridging existing gaps among law, policymaking, and the lived experience of citizens. In recent years, a number of initiatives across the world have applied crowdsourcing to contexts including constitutional reform, drafting federal bills, and generating local policies. However, crowd-civic systems also come with challenges and risks such as socio-technical barriers, marginalization of specific groups, silencing of interests, etc. Using a designthinking approach, this workshop will address both opportunities and challenges of crowd-civic systems to develop best practices for increasing public engagement with law and policy. The workshop organizers will suggest an initial framework explicitly intended to be criticized by participants and reconfigured through a series of iterative cooperative small-group activities focusing on “diagnosing” the failures of past crowd-civic system efforts and the successes of online action around social issues. While the ultimate objective of the workshop is to develop a best practices guide, we see iterations on the guide as a mechanism for fostering community and collaboration among policymakers, technologists, and researchers around crowd-civic systems for law and policy

Automated Language-Based Feedback FOR TEAMWORK BEHAVIORS

While most collaboration technologies are concerned with supporting task accomplishment, members of work teams do not always have the skills necessary for effective teamwork. In this research I propose that providing dynamic feedback generated by automated analysis of language behavior can help team members reflect on and subsequently improve their teamwork behaviors. This prospect is developed based on research in multiple disciplines, including teamwork effectiveness and social behaviors, feedback for training and regulating behaviors, and use of language in group conversations. To support this research, I directed the design and development of GroupMeter, a web-based chat system that analyzes conversations using a dictionarybased word count technique and visualizes indicators of language. I present a set of requirements for the GroupMeter system and the iterative process in which its design evolved. Findings from experiment 1 included a set of linguistic indicators that may serve as a useful source of automated feedback, such as agreement words and selfreferences, and that were embedded into the GroupMeter system. Experiment

Understanding how bloggers feel: recognizing affect in blog posts

One of the goals of affective computing is to recognize human emotions. We present a system that learns to recognize emotions based on textual resources and test it on a large number of blog entries tagged with moods by their authors. We show how a machine-learning approach can be used to gain insight into the way writers convey and interpret their own emotions, and provide nuanced mood associations for a large wordlist

Understanding how bloggers feel: recognizing affect in blog posts

ABSTRACT One of the goals of affective computing is to recognize human emotions. In this paper, we present a system that learns to recognize emotions based on textual resources. We use as input a large number of blog entries tagged by their authors with moods during the course of writing, rather than post-hoc or third-party labeling. We show how words in the texts exemplify the moods, present satisfactory results for the mood recognition task, and illustrate a method for analyzing mood synonymy within blog entries. Our findings suggest that an automated machine-learning approach can be used to gain insight into the way writers convey and interpret their own emotions

The Magic Sauce: Practices of Facilitation in Online Policy Deliberation

Online engagement in policy deliberation is one of the more complex aspects of open government. Previous research on human facilitation of policy deliberation has focused primarily on the citizens who need facilitation. In this paper we unpack the facilitation practices from the perspective of the moderator. We present an interview study of facilitators in RegulationRoom – an online policy deliberation platform. Our findings reveal that facilitators focus primarily on two broad activities: managing the stream of comments and interacting with comments and commenters – both aimed at obtaining high quality public input into the particular policymaking process. Managing the immediate goals of online policy deliberations, however, might overshadow long-term goals pf public deliberation, i.e. helping individuals develop participatory literacy beyond a single policy engagement. Our contribution is twofold: we unpack the practice of human facilitation in online policy deliberation, and suggest both design and process implications for sustainable growth of civic engagement environments beyond the individual case we analyze

Metaphors for Social Relationships in 3D Virtual Worlds

ABSTRACT A number of conceptual metaphors have been previously suggested for identity management, including, for example, theatre stage, onion layers, and identity segments. Based on an analysis of 30 in-depth interviews with Second Life residents, we examine the extent to which these metaphors can be used to explain experiences of social relationships in and across virtual and material worlds. The data suggest that these metaphors are relevant to social interactions in and across virtual and material environments: individuals perform on a stage to and with others, they gradually reveal layers of themselves, and they distinguish between segments of their identity in different social situations. At the same time, these metaphors do not explain all experiences, pointing to future research on virtual environments, social relationships, and identity management

Recognizing Affect in Blog Posts

One of the goals of affective computing is to recognize human emotions. We present a system that learns to recognize emotions based on textual resources and test it on a large number of blog entries tagged with moods by their authors. We show how a machine-learning approach can be used to gain insight into the way writers convey and interpret their own emotions, and provide nuanced mood associations for a large wordlist

Context of Use Evaluation of Peripheral Displays (CUEPD)

Abstract. A gap exists between the growing prevalence of peripheral displays and appropriate methods for their evaluation. Mankoff et al. [11] present one attempt to bridge this gap by adapting Nielsen’s Heuristic evaluation to the defining characteristics and goals of peripheral displays. In this paper, we present a complementary approach that depends on active user participation and emphasizes the experience of using peripheral displays. The Context of Use Evaluation of Peripheral Displays (CUEPD) captures context of use through individualized scenario building, enactment and reflection. We illustrate the CUEPD method in a study to evaluate two peripheral displays. The evaluation using CUEPD revealed important design recommendations, suggesting that the method may be an important advance in evaluation methods for peripheral displays.