Collecting and organizing citizen opinions: A dynamic microtask approach and its evaluation

Abstract

Citizens’ opinions are important information resources for democratic local governments. Since a mere collection of opinions is not easy to analyze, the collected opinions should be organized, so that the governments can effectively analyze it. Recently, web-based public opinion collection systems have been widely used, but many of them merely implement traditional methods. For example, collecting opinions in web-based questionnaire still use free-text fields, and organizing the collected opinions remains a cumbersome task for the government staff. This paper explores a new design space and proposes a scheme where citizens take part in organizing and classifying opinions while answering the questionnaire. In the scheme, we collect citizen opinions in a structured form, with a microtask interface that changes the list of choices dynamically. Our system has been used by Tsukuba city for several real-world opinion-collection projects. Our experience so far shows that the scheme is effective in organizing the collected opinions for analysis.