Idea Browsing on Digital Participation Platforms: A Mixed-Methods Requirements Study

[fr] Digital participation platforms (DPP) are websites initiated by local governments through which citizens can post and react to ideas for their city. In practice, the majority of DPP users browse the posted ideas without contributing any. This activity, referred to as lurking, has widely recognized positive outcomes, especially in a citizen participation context. However, it has been devoted little attention. In practice, the idea browsing features available on current DPP are limited, and the literature has not evaluated the available approaches nor studied the requirements for idea browsing. In this paper, we report on an evaluation of the filterable list, which is the most common idea browsing approach on DPP. Our findings show that it lacks stimulation hedonic quality and call for a more stimulating approach. Thus, we conducted 11 semi-structured interviews to collect requirements and found that idea browsing on DPP should be supported by the combination of (1) a stimulating interactive representation such as circle packing or thematic trees displayed as entry point and (2) a filterable list for deeper exploration. This article is the first to study requirements for idea browsing features on DPP.

Disciplines :

Engineering, computing & technology: Multidisciplinary, general & others

Author, co-author :

Clarinval, Antoine

Albert, Julien

Schelings, Clémentine ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Urban and Environmental Engineering

Elsen, Catherine ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Urban and Environmental Engineering

Dumas, Bruno

Castiaux, Annick

Language :

English

Title :

Idea Browsing on Digital Participation Platforms: A Mixed-Methods Requirements Study

Publication date :

23 May 2023

Event name :

RCIS 2023: Research Challenges in Information Science: Information Science and the Connected World

Event organizer :

Nurcan, S., Opdahl, A.L., Mouratidis, H., Tsohou, A.

Event place :

Corfu, Greece

Event date :

23-26 mai 2023

Event number :

Audience :

International

Journal title :

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

ISSN :

1865-1348

eISSN :

1865-1356

Publisher :

Springer, Germany

Volume :

476

Pages :

35-50

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

Name of the research project :

Wal-E-Cities

Funders :

FEDER - Fonds Européen de Développement Régional [BE]

Available on ORBi :

since 30 May 2023

Statistics

Number of views

18 (1 by ULiège)

Number of downloads

47 (0 by ULiège)

More statistics

Scopus citations^®

Scopus citations^®
without self-citations

OpenCitations

Bibliography

Aristeidou, M., Scanlon, E., Sharples, M.: Profiles of engagement in online communities of citizen science participation. Comput. Hum. Behav. 74, 246–256 (2017)
Arnold, N., Paulus, T.: Using a social networking site for experiential learning: appropriating, lurking, modeling and community building. Internet High. Educ. 13(4), 188–196 (2010)
Arnstein, S.: A ladder of citizen participation. J. Am. Inst. Plann. 35(4), 216–224 (1969)
Berntzen, L., Johannessen, M.R.: The role of citizen participation in municipal smart city projects: lessons learned from Norway. In: Gil-Garcia, J.R., Pardo, T.A., Nam, T. (eds.) Smarter as the New Urban Agenda. PAIT, vol. 11, pp. 299–314. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17620-8 16
Bishop, J.: Increasing participation in online communities: a framework for human-computer interaction. Comput. Hum. Behav. 23(4), 1881–1893 (2007)
Brandtzæg, P.B.: Towards a unified media-user typology (MUT): a meta-analysis and review of the research literature on media-user typologies. Comput. Hum. Behav. 26(5), 940–956 (2010)
Callahan, K.: Citizen participation: models and methods. Int. J. Public Adm. 30(11), 1179–1196 (2007)
Clarinval, A., Simonofski, A., Vanderose, B., Dumas, B.: Public displays and citizen participation: a systematic literature review and research agenda. Transform. Gov. People Process Policy 15(1), 1–35 (2021)
Creswell, J.W., Clark, V.L.P.: Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. Sage, London (2017)
Cugurullo, F.: How to build a sandcastle: an analysis of the genesis and development of Masdar City. J. Urban Technol. 20(1), 23–37 (2013)
Edelmann, N.: Reviewing the definitions of “lurkers” and some implications for online research. Cyberpsychol. Behav. Soc. Netw. 16(9), 645–649 (2013)
Edelmann, N., Parycek, P., Schossbock, J.: The unibrennt movement: a successful case of mobilising lurkers in a public sphere. Int. J. Electron. Gov. 4(1–2), 43–68 (2011)
Faridani, S., Bitton, E., Ryokai, K., Goldberg, K.: Opinion space: a scalable tool for browsing online comments. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1175–1184. Association for Computing Machinery (2010)
Farina, C.R., Epstein, D., Heidt, J.B., Newhart, M.J.: Regulation room: getting “more, better” civic participation in complex government policymaking. Transform. Gov. People Process Policy 7(4), 501–516 (2013)
Fung, A.: Varieties of participation in complex governance. Public Adm. Rev. 66, 66–75 (2006)
Goncalves, J., Hosio, S., Liu, Y., Kostakos, V.: Eliciting situated feedback: a comparison of paper, web forms and public displays. Displays 35(1), 27–37 (2014)
Gray, B.: Informal learning in an online community of practice. J. Dist. Educ. 19(1), 20–35 (2004)
Hassenzahl, M., Burmester, M., Koller, F.: Attrakdiff: Ein fragebogen zur messung wahrgenommener hedonischer und pragmatischer qualität. In: Szwillus, G., Ziegler, J. (eds.) Mensch & Computer 2003, pp. 187–196. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-80058-9 19
Irvin, R.A., Stansbury, J.: Citizen participation in decision making: is it worth the effort? Public Adm. Rev. 64(1), 55–65 (2004)
Johnson, R.B., Onwuegbuzie, A.J., Turner, L.A.: Toward a definition of mixed methods research. J. Mixed Methods Res. 1(2), 112–133 (2007)
King, C.S., Feltey, K.M., Susel, B.O.: The question of participation: toward authentic public participation in public administration. Public Adm. Rev. 317–326 (1998)
Kitchin, R.: The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal 79(1), 1–14 (2014)
Lackaff, D.: Case study: better reykjavik-open municipal policymaking. In: Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, p. 229 (2016)
Lago, N.: Digital platforms for participation in city plan: typology of citizens’ modes of presence. Technical report, University of Mons (2019)
Lago, N., Durieux, M., Pouleur, J.-A., Scoubeau, C., Elsen, C., Schelings, C.: Citizen participation through digital platforms: the challenging question of data processing for cities. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Cities, Systems, Devices and Technologies, pp. 19–25. International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (2019)
Lai, H.-M., Chen, T.T.: Knowledge sharing in interest online communities: a comparison of posters and lurkers. Comput. Hum. Behav. 35, 295–306 (2014)
Lallemand, C., Gronier, G.: Méthodes de design UX. Éditions Eyrolles, Paris (2018)
Lallemand, C., Koenig, V., Gronier, G., Martin, R.: Création et validation d’une version française du questionnaire attrakdiff pour l’évaluation de l’expérience util-isateur des systèmes interactifs. Eur. Rev. Appl. Psychol. 65(5), 239–252 (2015)
Lukensmeyer, C.J., Brigham, S.: Taking democracy to scale: creating a town hall meeting for the twenty-first century. Natl. Civ. Rev. 91(4), 351–366 (2002)
Macintosh, A.: eParticipation in policy-making: the research and the challenges. In: Cunningham, P., Cunningham, M. (eds.) Exploiting the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications and Case Studies, vol. 3, pp. 364–369. IOS Press (2006)
Malinen, S.: Understanding user participation in online communities: a systematic literature review of empirical studies. Comput. Hum. Behav. 46, 228–238 (2015)
McKenzie, P.J.: A model of information practices in accounts of everyday-life information seeking. J. Doc. 59(1), 19–40 (2003)
Muller, M.: Lurking as personal trait or situational disposition: lurking and contributing in enterprise social media. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 253–256. Association for Computing Machinery (2012)
Nielsen, J.: The 90-9-1 rule for participation inequality in social media and online communities (2006)
Nonnecke, B., Preece, J.: Lurker demographics: counting the silent. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 73–80. Association for Computing Machinery (2000)
Nonnecke, B., Preece, J.: Silent participants: getting to know lurkers better. In: Lueg, C., Fisher, D. (eds.) From usenet to CoWebs, pp. 110–132. Springer, London (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0057-7 6
Preece, J., Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D.: The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone. Comput. Hum. Behav. 20(2), 201–223 (2004)
Romariz Peixoto, L., Rectem, L., Pouleur, J.-A.: Citizen participation in architecture and urban planning confronted with arnstein’s ladder: four experiments into popular neighbourhoods of hainaut demonstrate another hierarchy. Architecture 2(1), 114–134 (2022)
Royo, S., Pina, V., Garcia-Rayado, J.: Decide Madrid: a critical analysis of an award-winning e-participation initiative. Sustainability 12(4), 1674 (2020)
Rudd, J., Stern, K., Isensee, S.: Low vs. high-fidelity prototyping debate. Interactions 3(1), 76–85 (1996)
Sandstrom, C., Bjork, J., et al.: Idea management systems for a changing innovation landscape. Int. J. Prod. Dev. 11(3–4), 310–324 (2010)
Schelings, C.: Renouveau des approches participatives pour la fabrique de la Smart City. PhD thesis, Université de Liège (ULiège) (2021)
Serramia, M., et al.: Citizen support aggregation methods for participatory platforms. In: Artificial Intelligence Research and Development, pp. 9–18. IOS Press (2019)
Shneiderman, B.: The eyes have it: a task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. In: Proceedings of the Symposium on Visual Languages, pp. 336– 343. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1996)
Simonofski, A., Snoeck, M., Vanderose, B.: Co-creating e-government services: an empirical analysis of participation methods in Belgium. In: Rodriguez Bolivar, M.P. (ed.) Setting Foundations for the Creation of Public Value in Smart Cities. PAIT, vol. 35, pp. 225–245. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98953-2 9
Smith, M.A., Kollock, P.: Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge, London (1999)
Sun, N., Rau, P.P.-L., Ma, L.: Understanding lurkers in online communities: a literature review. Comput. Hum. Behav. 38, 110–117 (2014)
Takahashi, M., Fujimoto, M., Yamasaki, N.: The active lurker: influence of an in-house online community on its outside environment. In: Proceedings of the International SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 1–10. Association for Computing Machinery (2003)
Tavanapour, N., Poser, M., Bittner, E.A.: Supporting the idea generation process in citizen participation-toward an interactive system with a conversational agent as facilitator. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems, pp. 1–17 (2019)
Thiel, S.-K., Lehner, U.: Exploring the effects of game elements in m-participation. In: Proceedings of the British HCI Conference, pp. 65–73 (2015)
Moere, A.V., Hill, D.: Designing for the situated and public visualization of urban data. J. Urban Technol. 19(2), 25–46 (2012)
Zeng, Z., et al.: The impact of social nudges on user-generated content for social network platforms. Management Science (2022). https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4622