RisingEmotions

Led by: Carolina Aragón, Mahmood Jasim, Narges Mahyar
Read More: http://www.carolinaaragon.com/#/risingemotions/

RisingEMOTIONS is a collaborative art project that displayed projected flood levels and people’s emotions about sea-level rise in East Boston. The installation showed the elevation for the projected 1% annual chance flood for 2070 with colored ribbons to raise awareness about climate change. The colors represented people’s feelings and contained hand-written transcriptions of comments left by participants in an online survey. Over 150 people responded to the survey about their feelings related to the effects of sea level rise in East Boston. (http://risingemotions.cs.umass.edu/) These responses were color-coded and transcribed into ribbons to represent the feelings. The art project was on display in front of the East Boston Branch of the Boston Public Library. The opening celebration was attended by Speakers included State Representatives Sen. Adrian Madero and Sen. Joe Boncore, and climate scientists Dr. Paul Kirshen and Chris Watson from UMass Boston Sustainable Solutions Lab.

Civic Data Deluge

Led by: Narges Mahyar
The Civic Data Deluge: Understanding the Challenges of Analyzing Large-Scale Community Input.

Advancements in digital civics have enabled leaders to engage and gather input from a broader spectrum of the public. However, less is known about the analysis process around community input and the challenges faced by civic leaders as engagement practices scale up. To understand these challenges, we conducted 21 interviews with leaders on civic-oriented projects. We found that at a small-scale, civic leaders manage to facilitate sensemaking through collaborative or individual approaches. However, as civic leaders scale engagement practices to account for more diverse perspectives, making sense of the large quantity of qualitative data becomes a challenge. Civic leaders could benefit from training in qualitative data analysis and simple, scalable collaborative analysis tools that would help the community form a shared understanding. Drawing from these insights, we discuss opportunities for designing tools that could improve civic leaders’ ability to utilize and reflect public input in decisions.

CommunityClick

Led by: Mahmood Jasim
CommunityClick: Capturing and Reporting Community Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity
CommunityClick: Towards Improving Inclusivity in Town Halls
Project Video

Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees’ feedback in reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing system that captures attendees’ feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees’ feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees’ feedback and organizers’ tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incorporated into an interactive authoring tool for organizers to write reports. From a field experiment at a town hall meeting, we demonstrate how CommunityClick can improve inclusivity by providing multiple avenues for attendees to share opinions. Additionally, interviews with eight expert organizers demonstrate CommunityClick’s utility in creating more comprehensive and accurate reports to inform critical civic decision-making. We discuss the possibility of integrating CommunityClick with town hall meetings in the future as well as expanding to other domains. 

Our next step in this project is to virtualize the iClicker component to enable silent attendees to share their opinions during online meetings and discussions.