The design of civic technology

Factors that influence public participation and impact

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Andrew May, Tracy Ross

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public’s use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms.

Contents

1. Abstract
2. Introduction
3. Related work
4. Study design
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion

All external research linked on this page give the views of the author(s), and not the position of mySociety

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