DeliberationWorks: A Deliberation System for Developing Capacities in Civic Organizing

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-05-02 · 1 citations

Civic technologies have helped activists mobilize large groups of people to complete simple actions like sharing a post on social media or signing an online petition. While mobilizing large numbers of people to complete low effort actions is important, mobilizing does not develop peoples' capacities to organize, which requires moving people up an engagement ladder to interdependently work with others on increasingly complex and challenging collective actions. Research on civic organizing suggests that deliberating with others about what collective actions to plan and complete is key to developing people's capacities to organize. In this paper, we explore whether deliberation can help organizers support potential activists in moving up the organizing engagement ladder. DeliberationWorks, a computer-supported deliberation system presents potential activists with background information on collective actions and intrapersonal deliberation questions, facilitates group discussion with experienced organizers, and prompts activists to fill out action plans for completing actions. Findings across two field deployments suggest that DeliberationWorks effectively helped organizers support potential activists in increasing their knowledge and interest in taking collective action, as well as successfully planning actions. Yet our findings also present a complex picture of additional learning challenges organizers encounter in deepening potential activists' engagement with organizing beyond the deliberation. We present four distinct engagement journeys based on participants' experiences during and after the deliberation to inform the design of future socio-technical interventions for moving potential activists further up the ladder. Our findings suggest that future systems designed to develop people's capacities to organize should help organizers invest in potential activists' capacities to increase engagement in the organization through 1-1 coaching and follow-up communications, based on understanding of their interests and needs from the deliberation. We contribute a novel approach that leverages organizing theory to design deliberation features to support organizers in increasing people's engagement with organizing, as well as evidence collected across two case study deployments that contribute a deepened understanding of new potential activists' needs in getting started with organizing.

AI That Helps Us Help Each Other: A Proactive System for Scaffolding Mentor-Novice Collaboration in Entrepreneurship Coaching

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16

Entrepreneurship requires navigating open-ended, ill-defined problems: identifying risks, challenging assumptions, and making strategic decisions under deep uncertainty. Novice founders often struggle with these metacognitive demands, while mentors face limited time and visibility to provide tailored support. We present a human-AI coaching system that combines a domain-specific cognitive model of entrepreneurial risk with a large language model (LLM) to proactively scaffold both novice and mentor thinking. The system proactively poses diagnostic questions that challenge novices' thinking and helps both novices and mentors plan for more focused and emotionally attuned meetings. Critically, mentors can inspect and modify the underlying cognitive model, shaping the logic of the system to reflect their evolving needs. Through an exploratory field deployment, we found that using the system supported novice metacognition, reduced mentors' cognitive load, and improved meeting depth, intentionality, and focus--while also surfaced key tensions around trust, misdiagnosis, and expectations of AI. We contribute design principles for proactive AI systems that scaffold metacognition and human-human collaboration in complex, ill-defined domains, offering implications for similar domains like healthcare, education, and knowledge work.

Technologies for Building Power in an Age of Democratic Backsliding: Advancing a Vision for People Power in CSCW Research

2025-10-17 · 1 citations

As the world faces new threats of authoritarianism, CSCW researchers must reckon with the dangerous consequences and new possibilities for technology to facilitate people-powered social change. Community organizing, where groups take collective action, develop leaders, and build power, has long been studied and practiced as one of the most impactful ways for ordinary people to contest for power on unequal political terrain. While existing civic technologies have explored collective actions from mass participation and mobilization, connective action, and democratic deliberation, CSCW researchers have focused less on examining the role of technologies in facilitating the complex work behind community organizing—from building the skills and capacities for organizations with powerful and resilient member bases, to supporting the relational work of transforming relationships into power. We invite researchers from across CSCW who are committed to social justice and democratic change to forge a research agenda for collaborative technologies that empower communities, particularly those most disenfranchised, to meet our global political moment. This SIG is designed to build relationships, establish a community of practice, and identify points of future research and collaboration—a crucial first step to realizing a transformative vision for CSCW research as civic and democratic duty in increasingly undemocratic times.

V-FRAMER: Visualization Framework for Mitigating Reasoning Errors in Public Policy

2024-02-24

Existing data visualization design guidelines focus primarily on constructing grammatically-correct visualizations that faithfully convey the values and relationships in the underlying data. However, a designer may create a grammatically-correct visualization that still leaves audiences susceptible to reasoning misleaders, e.g. by failing to normalize data or using unrepresentative samples. Reasoning misleaders are especially pernicious when presenting public policy data, where data-driven decisions can affect public health, safety, and economic development. Through textual analysis, a formative evaluation, and iterative design with 19 policy communicators, we construct an actionable visualization design framework, V-FRAMER, that effectively synthesizes ways of mitigating reasoning misleaders. We discuss important design considerations for frameworks like V-FRAMER, including using concrete examples to help designers understand reasoning misleaders, and using a hierarchical structure to support example-based accessing. We further describe V-FRAMER's congruence with current practice and how practitioners might integrate the framework into their existing workflows. Related materials available at: https://osf.io/q3uta/.

Engaging Stakeholders in Deliberation for Organizational Design

Proceedings. · 2024-06-10

Deliberation involves applying knowledge, synthesizing ideas, weighing different options and reflection by stakeholders who negotiate a decision that leads to implementation.While we know about many of the cognitive processes involved in deliberation, we know little about how stakeholders become involved in deliberation in real-world, non-binding contexts.This study investigates the processes of building up a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) certificate program for undergraduate students at a private university.We analyzed 334 messages from 57 stakeholders' email exchanges, meetings, and interview transcripts to reveal the stakeholder-seeking process and outreach strategies.Results showed that deliberation started from a small group of active stakeholders who accounted for most of the work and outreach.Our findings reveal that an effective stakeholder involvement strategy is the key for the outcome of deliberation to factor in implementation in the observed case.We also consider the types of learning required by individuals and the group in deliberation. Deliberation in the classroomDeliberation entails exploring diverse perspectives, challenging assumptions, and reaching consensus through open discussion.This process aims to facilitate idea exchange and alignment among participants toward common goals (Locke, 2019;Paul, 2017).Civic education scholars have argued that students should have chances to bolster their civic engagement experience (Levine, 2008) including practicing democratic deliberation where learners utilize their experiences collaboratively to find solutions to the challenging issues impacting their lives and communities (Levine, 2000;Munoz & Wrigley, 2012).People need to learn how to do deliberation to be effective civic actors (Levine, 2022).Practicing deliberation in the classroom prepares students to make collaborative decisions and adopt broader perspectives.However, the transition from the classroom to real-world settings reveals the absence of prearranged environments conducive to deliberation.In the real-world scenarios, citizens often confront situations where they must initiate deliberative processes from scratch, and the essence of implementation emerges in those unscripted scenarios.Thus, it is essential for civic education to provide students with the necessary knowledge and abilities to engage as activists, extending beyond mere participation in discussion to adopt the competence of initiating and sustaining deliberation at both individual and group levels. Deliberation in the real worldPolitical scientist Robert Dahn (1989) proposed mini-publics, such as citizens' assemblies, as a process for engaging citizens in dealing with public issues.In mini-publics, people are randomly selected as the representatives of a bigger population.They work together to deliberate and learn from one another to make collective decisions for public good.Mini-public participants hold equal rights.Every participant has an equal chance of being selected to represent the broader population.Mini-publics thus promote deliberation and representation better than existing political decision-making processes.Unfortunately, mini-publics often fail to have political impact in practice.For instance, in 2019 the Scottish government initiated a mini-public, with 104 participants to deliberate the nation's future amidst Brexit challenges.Despite positive feedback on its execution, concerns linger about the feasibility of recommendations and their impact on government policies.The outcome of mini-publics failed to result in policy changes.Studying how mini-publics work looks promising from the normative perspective, but it needs a clear set of rules and structures for the process to result in policy changes, especially when mini-publics are frequently used for giving advice (Setala, 2021). Binding and non-binding contextsIn a binding context, the decisions made during deliberation must be carried out, in the way a jury's decision in a court of law is enforced after the trial, their verdict settles the case.The jury's decision is accepted as binding ahead of the deliberation, which with certainty leads to implementation.Other examples of binding decisions include company staff executing the deliberative decisions of a board meeting, or city staff performing the resolutions from city council members' deliberation.The outcome of deliberation in each case is accepted as binding before the processes of deliberation begins.Conversely, in a non-binding context, decision makers are

V-FRAMER: Visualization Framework for Mitigating Reasoning Errors in Public Policy

2024-05-11 · 9 citations

Existing data visualization design guidelines focus primarily on constructing grammatically-correct visualizations that faithfully convey the values and relationships in the underlying data. However, a designer may create a grammatically-correct visualization that still leaves audiences susceptible to reasoning misleaders, e.g. by failing to normalize data or using unrepresentative samples. Reasoning misleaders are especially pernicious when presenting public policy data, where data-driven decisions can affect public health, safety, and economic development. Through textual analysis, a formative evaluation, and iterative design with 19 policy communicators, we construct an actionable visualization design framework, V-FRAMER, that effectively synthesizes ways of mitigating reasoning misleaders. We discuss important design considerations for frameworks like V-FRAMER, including using concrete examples to help designers understand reasoning misleaders, and using a hierarchical structure to support example-based accessing. We further describe V-FRAMER’s congruence with current practice and how practitioners might integrate the framework into their existing workflows. Related materials available at: https://osf.io/q3uta/.

Research Slices

EDeR Educational Design Research · 2024-02-26

Educational Design Research (EDeR) methodologists argue that iteration is a core component of EDeR. Iteration is currently defined as a process of gathering more information through actions, such as testing, and using that information to improve the design. In this paper, we seek to tighten the definition of iteration to help EDeR teams conduct iterations more effectively. We argue that EDeR teams should organize their research in slices that deliver small but real value to end users while informing the design research. EDeR should pick slices that are: (a) minimal and focused, (b) deployed in a real context, (c) valuable to the end users, and (d) informative to the research. Slicing helps EDeR teams increase ecological validity when they test because it allows testing which is within real-world educational contexts or with the stakeholders who will use and be impacted by the design. Increasing ecological validity of testing is particularly important because EDeR projects tackle highly complex real-world problems with many unknown elements and relational complexity—this means it is challenging to predict what designs will have the desired impact without real-world deployment. Effective iteration through organizing research in slices helps EDeR teams to better support stakeholder goals, develop more impactful theory, and have greater and earlier impact upon education.

Intelligent Coaching Systems: Understanding One-to-many Coaching for Ill-defined Problem Solving

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2023-04-14 · 8 citations

One-to-many coaching is a common, yet difficult, coaching technique used in environments with many novices learning to solve ill-defined problems. Intelligent systems might be designed to support 1-to-many coaching but designing such systems requires a 1-to-many coaching model that details novices' challenges, coaches' strategies, and coaches' goals. To build such a model, we conducted interaction analysis on 24 1-to-many coaching sessions with novices developing new products in a university incubator and conducted retrospective analyses with 3 coaches and 30 novices. We contribute a model that demonstrates that coaches in a 1-to-many setting not only need to help novices develop metacognitive skills (just as in 1-to-1 coaching), but also need to utilize the presence and expertise of a group of novices to learn from each other, to mitigate their fear of failures, and provide them accountability. Our model informs design implications for future intelligent coaching systems to (1) assist coaches in monitoring and comparing many novices' progress, learning, and expertise; (2) provide novices with checklists, templates, and scaffolds to help them self-evaluate, seek-help, and summarize learning; (3) showcase failures and growth; and (4) publicize planning and progress to provide accountability.

Increasing Inclusion and Time-Efficiency in Participatory Policy-Making Deliberations with E-Scribing Technology

2023-09-26 · 3 citations

Citizens can increase openness, transparency, and accountability of institutions by taking part in face-to-face participatory policy-making deliberations, such as participatory budgeting assemblies. But for participants’ contributions to influence policy outcomes, organizers need to capture and synthesize participants’ input. Existing approaches are not inclusive for participants or require too much time from organizers. We designed e-scribing, a novel approach for capturing and synthesizing participants’ input from face-to-face deliberations in real time by combining scribes with digital technology. To evaluate the approach, we built DeliberationWorks, a digital deliberation technology that helps scribes (a) capture proxy input (i.e., as participants) that is complete and accurate so that participants do not need to interact with technology themselves and (b) synthesize the discussion in real time using labels. We deployed DeliberationWorks with 5 scribes in two face-to-face deliberations with 8-10 participants and found that, on average, 82% of the input was captured mostly accurately. After one hour of training, scribes synthesized input within 10 minutes of the end of the deliberation. Our findings suggest that e-scribing makes participatory policy-making more inclusive by allowing participants to share their input without interacting with technology, and more time-efficient by reducing synthesis and training times for organizers.

Scoping deliberations: scaffolding engagement in planning collective action

Instructional Science · 2023-07-08 · 2 citations