Community Issue Review: Crystallizing Knowledge for Encouraging Civic Engagement

Civic engagement in public decision-making requires that people form opinions or judgments based on the insights and knowledge around a public issue. Such knowledge is often not easily accessible by citizens because information about a policy issue tends to be scattered and buried in large and complex sources of potentially diluted and messy data. This creates information barriers that prevent ordinary citizens from effectively participating in government issues. We present an approach to addressing this problem that involves crystallizing the bits and pieces of knowledge scattered in the data into a form of knowledge that is well-framed, compact, and trustworthy to the citizens. This approach is articulated as a knowledge crystallization framework that specify the goals and processes of crystallizing policy knowledge. Following this framework, we present a concrete process, community issue review (CIR), that can be practiced as public decision analysis tools in a variety of community contexts. We implemented and used CIR in evaluating a real community proposal and observed the positive impact on the level of engagement. In the same time, we received feedback on how the CIR process and the supporting technology can be improved or be made more flexible to support best practices.