Public engagement and deliberation play key roles in democratic society. Yet, there are significant problems in both of these areas at present in America. Civic engagement is uneven at best, and thoughtful public deliberation about major issues is often displaced either by apathy or shrill and extreme voices.

The Engage Project is a collaboration among faculty and students in the departments of Communication, Computer Science and Human Centered Design. It is funded by NSF grant #0966929, Socio-Computational Systems to Support Public Engagement and Deliberation. Our purpose is to investigate the design, implementation, deployment, and testing of innovative ways for citizens and government to communicate. The overall aim is to achieve measurable improvements in citizen engagement, participation, and deliberation.

People

• Sheetal D. Agarwal, Department of Communication
• Lance Bennett, Departments of Communication and Political Science
• Alan Borning, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
• Deen G. Freelon, Department of Communication
• Travis Kriplean, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
• Jonathan T. Morgan, Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering

Current Activities

• ConsiderIt: an open source platform that seamlessly combines the virtues of personal reflection and public deliberation
• Living Voters Guide: a citizen-generated guide to the measures on the November 2010 Washington State election, developed in cooperation with the Seattle CityClub, a non-partisan, nonprofit education organization dedicated to informing citizens and building community leadership in the greater Seattle area; and built using the ConsiderIt platform.
• Reflect: a tool for crowdsourced comment summarization and active listening

Partners

• Design, Use, Build group
• Center for Communication and Civic Engagement
• Seattle City Club

Publications

• Supporting Reflective Public Thought with ConsiderIt.
  Kriplean, T., Morgan, J. T., Freelon, D., Borning, A., and Bennett, W. L.
  CSCW 2012: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
  full paper (pdf)
• ConsiderIt: Improving Structured Public Deliberation.
  Kriplean, T., Morgan, J. T., Freelon, D., Borning, A., Bennett, L.
  Work in progress, CHI 2011.
  Abstract | Poster
• Facilitating Encounters with Political Difference: Engaging Voters with the Living Voters Guide.
  Freelon, D., Kriplean, T., Morgan, J. T., Bennett, W. L., Borning, A.
  JITP 2011: The Future of Computational Social Science, May 16-17, 2011.
• ConsiderIt: Improving Structured Public Deliberation.
  Kriplean, T., Morgan, J. T., Freelon, D., Borning, A., Bennett, L.
  CHI 2011: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011.
• Supporting Active Listening and Grounding on the Web through Restatement.
  Kriplean, T., Toomim, M., Morgan, J. T., Borning, A. and Ko, A. J.
  CSCW 2011: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2011. Horizons

Talks

• The Living Voters Guide: Supporting Reflective Public Thought.
  Travis Kriplean and Alan Borning.
  Colloquium, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, October 2011.
  Talk abstract and video

© 2011 Engage Group, University of Washington