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, and by a Google Research Award. 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.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
People
- Sheetal D. Agarwal, Department of Communication
- Lance Bennett, Departments of Communication and Political Science
- Alan Borning, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
- Courtney Johnson, Department of Communication
- Travis Kriplean, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
- Caterina Rost, Department of Communication
Alumni
- Deen G. Freelon, School of Communication, American University, Washington D.C.
- Jonathan T. Morgan, Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering
- Allison Obourn, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
- Christoph Peschel, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany (was a visiting student in UW CSE)
- Loki White, Department of Computer Science & 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 ballot measures in Washington and California, developed in collaboration 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
Publications
-
Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters GuideJournal of Information Technology & Politics, Volume 9, Issue 3 pp. 279-297.
-
Is This What You Meant? Promoting Listening on the Web with Reflect,CHI 2012: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.full paper (pdf)
-
Supporting Reflective Public Thought with ConsiderIt.CSCW 2012: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.full paper (pdf)
-
ConsiderIt: Improving Structured Public Deliberation.Work in progress, CHI 2011.
-
Facilitating Encounters with Political Difference: Engaging Voters with the Living Voters Guide.JITP 2011: The Future of Computational Social Science, May 16-17, 2011.
-
ConsiderIt: Improving Structured Public Deliberation.CHI 2011: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011.
-
Supporting Active Listening and Grounding on the Web through Restatement.CSCW 2011: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2011. Horizons
Talks
-
The Living Voters Guide: Supporting Reflective Public Thought.Colloquium, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, October 2011.