Crystallizing local political knowledge for informed public participation

Abstract

Municipal governments often struggle to inform and engage citizens around local issues. Due to complexities of local politics and the diverse expressions in public and private spheres, citizens face a huge information barrier towards meaningful participation. To overcome such barrier, we explore a solution to provide citizens with clear, useful, and trustworthy information. We describe a framework for accomplishing this goal through issue-based knowledge crystallization. In order to put this framework into test, we devised Community Issue Review (CIR) as a concrete process for crystallizing local political knowledge. CIR is a structured deliberative process that use a citizen panel to conduct analysis of data relevant to a pending issue. We describe CIR in three aspects of its functions: institutional design, deliberative process, and productive outcome. Three special characteristics of CIR are emphasized: (1) fully embedded within local decision-making context; (2) hybrid (face-to-face and online) deliberation; (3) facilitation on collaborative decision-analysis. We present the iterative design of the CIR process and the lessons learned from field practices in a local community.