research-article

Public Access

The Problem of Community Engagement: Disentangling the Practices of Municipal Government

Authors:

Christopher A. Le DantecAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Paper No.: 574, Pages 1 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174148

Published: 21 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we work to inform the growing space of Digital Civics with a qualitative study of community engagement practices across the breadth of municipal departments and agencies in a large US city. We conducted 34 inter-views across 15 different departments, including elected and professional city employees to understand how different domains within local government define and practice the work of engaging residents. Our interviews focused on how respondents conceptualized community engagement, how it fit into the other forms of work, and what kinds of outcomes they sought when they did 'engagement.' By reporting on this broad qualitative account of the many forms the work of community engagement takes in local government, we are contributing to an expansive view of digital civics that looks beyond the transactions of service delivery or the privileged moments of democratic ritual, to consider the wider terrain of mundane, daily challenges when trying to bridge between municipal government and city residents.

References

[1]

Morgan G. Ames, Janet Go, Joseph "Jofish" Kaye, and Mirjana Spasojevic. 2011. Understanding technology choices and values through social class. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work-CSCW '11, 55.

Digital Library

[2]

Sherry Arnstein. 1969. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, 4: 216--224.

[3]

Mariam Asad, Christopher A. Le Dantec, Becky Nielsen, and Kate Diedrick. 2017. Creating a Sociotechnical API. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems- CHI '17, 2295--2306.

Digital Library

[4]

Harry C. Boyte. 2004. Everday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life.

[5]

Andrew Chadwick. 2012. Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance. Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 5, 540069: 45--75.

[6]

Andrew Chadwick and Christopher May. 2003. Interaction between States and Citizens in the Age of the Internet: The-Government" in the United States, Britain, and the European Union. Governance 16, 2: 271--300.

[7]

Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. 2014. Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States. Cambridge, MA.

[8]

Antonio Cordella and Carla M. Bonina. 2012. A public value perspective for ICT enabled public sector reforms: A theoretical reflection. Government Information Quarterly 29, 4: 512--520.

[9]

Clara Crivellaro, Rob Comber, J Bowers, Peter C Wright, and Patrick Olivier. 2014. A Pool of Dreams: Facebook, Politics and the Emergence of a Social Movement. In CHI '14: Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, 3573--3582.

Digital Library

[10]

Clara Crivellaro, Rob Comber, Martyn Dade-Robertson, Simon J. Bowen, Peter Wright, and Patrick Olivier. 2015. Contesting the city: enacting the pollitical through digitally supported urban walks. CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 2853--2862.

Digital Library

[11]

Clara Crivellaro, Alex Taylor, Vasillis Vlachokyriakos, Rob Comber, Bettina Nissen, and Peter Wright. 2016. Re-Making Places: HCI,'Community Building'and Change. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2958--2969.

Digital Library

[12]

Christopher A Le Dantec. 2016. Designing Publics. MIT Press.

Digital Library

[13]

Christopher A Le Dantec, Mariam Asad, Aditi Misra, and Kari E Watkins. 2015. Planning with crowdsourced data: rhetoric and representation in transportation planning. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work&Social Computing, 1717--1727.

Digital Library

[14]

Christopher A Le Dantec and W Keith Edwards. 2010. Across Boundaries of Influence and Accountability: The Multiple Scales of Public Sector Information Systems. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 113--122.

Digital Library

[15]

Jan van Dijk. 2000. Models of Democracy and Concepts of Communication. In Digital Democracy: Issues of Theory and Practice. SAGE Publications Ltd, 30--53.

[16]

Tawanna R. Dillahunt, Sheena Erete, Roxana Galusca, Aarti Israni, Denise Nacu, and Phoebe Sengers. 2017. Reflections on Design Methods for Underserved Communities. In Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing-CSCW '17 Companion, 409-- 413.

Digital Library

[17]

Lynn Dombrowski, Ellie Harmon, and Sarah Fox. 2016. Social Justice-Oriented Interaction Design. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems-DIS'16: 656--671.

Digital Library

[18]

John S Dryzek. 2000. Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, contestations. Oxford University Press on Demand.

[19]

Patrice A Dutil, Cosmo Howard, John Langford, and Jeffrey Roy. 2008. Rethinking government-public relationships in a digital world: customers, clients, or citizens? Journal of Information Technology&Politics 4, 1: 77--90.

[20]

Joakim Ekman and Erik Amnå. 2012. Political participation and civic engagement: Towards a new typology. Human Affairs 22: 283--300.

[21]

Nichola P. Emler. 2014. Political and Civic Engagement. In Political and Civic Engagement Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Martyn Barrett and Bruna Zani (eds.). Routledge, London and New York.

[22]

Sheena Erete and Jennifer O Burrell. 2017. Empowered Participation: How Citizens Use Technology in Local Governance. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-CHI '17: 2307--2319.

Digital Library

[23]

Jennifer Evans-Cowley. 2010. Planning in the age of Facebook: the role of social networking in planning processes. GeoJournal 75: 407--420.

[24]

Jennifer Evans-Cowley. 2010. Planning in the Real-Time City: The Future of Mobile Technology. Journal of Planning Literature 25, 2: 136--149.

[25]

Sarah Fox and Christopher A Le Dantec. 2014. Community historians: scaffolding community engagement through culture and heritage. In DIS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems, 785--794.

Digital Library

[26]

Archon Fung. 2006. Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy.

[27]

Jeremy Gilbert. 2013. Common Ground. Pluto Press.

[28]

J Glick. 2008. Gentrification and the Racialized Geography of Home Equity. Urban Affairs Review 44, 2: 280--295.

[29]

Adam Greenfield. 2013. Against the smart city. Do.

[30]

Derek L Hansen, Jes a Koepfler, Paul T Jaeger, John C Bertot, and Tracy Viselli. 2014. Civic Action Brokering Platforms: Facilitating Local Engagement with ACTion Alexandria. Cscw '14: 1308--1321.

Digital Library

[31]

Mike Harding, Bran Knowles, Nigel Davies, and Mark Rouncefield. 2015. HCI, Civic Engagement&Trust. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-CHI '15: 2833--2842.

Digital Library

[32]

David Held. 2006. Models of Democracy. Stanford University Press.

[33]

Alex Ingrams. 2015. Mobile phones, smartphones, and the transformation of civic behavior through mobile information and connectivity. Government Information Quarterly 32, 4: 506--515.

[34]

D R Insua, G E Kersten, J Rios, and C Grima. 2008. Towards decision support for participatory democracy. Information Systems and e-Business Management 6, 2: 161--191.

[35]

Bruce Katz and Amy Liu. 2000. Moving beyond sprawl. The Brookings Review 18, 2: 31.

[36]

Rob Kling. 1978. Automated Information Systems as Social Resources in Policy Making. 666-- 674.

Digital Library

[37]

Matthias Korn and Amy Voida. 2015. Creating Friction: Infrastructuring Civic Engagement in Everyday Life. Proc 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference: Critical Alternatives: 145--156.

Digital Library

[38]

Travis L Kriplean, Jonathan Morgan, Deen Freelon, A Borning, and Lance Bennett. 2012. Supporting reflective public thought with considerit. In CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 265--274.

Digital Library

[39]

Frank N. Laird. 1993. Participatory Analysis, Democracy, and Technological Decision Making. Science, Technology&Human Values 18, 3: 341--361.

[40]

John Law. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge.

[41]

Gary Marsden, Andrew Maunder, and Munier Parker. 2008. People are people, but technology is not technology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 366, 1881: 3795--3804.

[42]

David Martin, Mark Rouncefield, and Ian Sommerville. 2002. Applying patterns of cooperative interaction to work (re) design: e-government and planning. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 235--242.

Digital Library

[43]

John McCarthy and P Wright. 2015. Taking {A}part. MIT Press.

[44]

Karen Mossberger, Yonghong Wu, and Jared Crawford. 2013. Connecting citizens and local governments' Social media and interactivity in major U.S. cities. Government Information Quarterly 30, 4: 351--358.

[45]

G M Neumark. 2011. Public Administration and Politics, a Cultural Clash: The Case of Tenth and Monroe.

[46]

Davide Nicolini. 2013. Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.

[47]

Patrick Olivier and P Wright. 2015. Digital Civics: Taking a Local Turn. interactions 22, 4: 61--63.

Digital Library

[48]

Simon Parker, Phil Spires, Faizal Farook, and Melissa Mean. 2008. State of Trust: How to Build Better Relationships Between Councils and the Public. 1--77.

[49]

Harold Sackman. 1968. A public philosophy for real time information systems. In AFIPS '68 (Fall, part II): Proceedings of the December 9-11, 1968, fall joint computer conference, 1491--1498.

Digital Library

[50]

Christine Satchell. 2009. From Social Butterfly to Urban Citizen: The Evolution of Mobile Phone Practice. In Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics. Information Science Reference, New York, 353--365

[51]

Ari Schlesinger, W Keith Edwards, and Rebecca E Grinter. 2017. Intersectional HCI: Engaging Identity through Gender, Race, and Class.

[52]

Kjeld Schmidt. 2008. Taking CSCW Seriously: Supporting Articulation Work (1992). 1, 1: 45 --71.

[53]

Irving Seidman. 2012. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences.

[54]

Bryan Semaan, Heather Faucett, Scott P Robertson, Misa Maruyama, and Sara Douglas. 2015. Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere. In CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Digital Library

[55]

R Silcock. 2001. What is E-government. Parliamentary Affairs 54: 88--101.

[56]

Tamara Sims, Andrew E Reed, and Dawn C Carr. 2016. Information and Communication Technology Use Is Related to Higher Well-Being Among the Oldest - Old. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences: gbw130.

[57]

Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19, 3: 387--420.

[58]

Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage.

[59]

A Voida, Lynn Dombrowski, Gillian R Hayes, and Melissa Mazmanian. 2014. Shared values/conflicting logics: working around e-government systems. In CHI'14: Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, 3583 --3592

Digital Library

Cited By

Yang SDortheimer JSprecher AYang Q(2024)When design workshops meet chatbots: Meaningful participation at scale?International Journal of Architectural Computing10.1177/14780771241253440Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14780771241253440
Kim SFan BYang WRamey JFox SZhu HZimmerman JEslami M(2024)Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public SectorProceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3663384.3663407(1-12)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663384.3663407
Johnson IVlachokyriakos V(2024)Socio-digital Rural Resilience: An Exploration of Information Infrastructures Within and Across Rural Villages During Covid-19Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374008:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637400
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The Problem of Community Engagement: Disentangling the Practices of Municipal Government
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

Creating a Sociotechnical API: Designing City-Scale Community Engagement
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Community engagement is to cities what user experience is to computing: it signifies a large category that simultaneously speaks to general qualities of interaction and to specific ways of doing that interaction. Recently, digital civics has emerged as ...
Going the Distance: Trust Work for Citizen Participation
CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Trust is a vital component of citizen participation-whether citizens decide to engage in opportunities for participation in local government can hinge entirely on the existence of trust between citizens and public officials. Understanding the role of ...
Exploring Trust in Digital Civics
DIS '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Digital civics research seeks to understand how technology can create new forms of relationships and services between public officials and citizens in governance. To accomplish this, design in digital civics emphasizes the importance of relationships ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2018

8489 pages

ISBN:9781450356206

DOI:10.1145/3173574

General Chairs:
Regan Mandryk
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
,
Mark Hancock
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Mark Perry
Brunel University London, UK
,
Anna Cox
University College London, UK

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 April 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Badges

Honorable Mention

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National science foundation

Conference

CHI '18

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '18: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 21 - 26, 2018

Montreal QC, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 666 of 2,590 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

37
Total Citations
View Citations
1,905
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)538
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)49

Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Yang SDortheimer JSprecher AYang Q(2024)When design workshops meet chatbots: Meaningful participation at scale?International Journal of Architectural Computing10.1177/14780771241253440Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14780771241253440
Kim SFan BYang WRamey JFox SZhu HZimmerman JEslami M(2024)Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public SectorProceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3663384.3663407(1-12)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663384.3663407
Johnson IVlachokyriakos V(2024)Socio-digital Rural Resilience: An Exploration of Information Infrastructures Within and Across Rural Villages During Covid-19Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374008:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637400
Islam MRichardson DSaha MVarghese DBartindale TSaha PSaputra MOlivier P(2024)Recordkeeping in Voice-based Remote Community EngagementProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642779(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642779
Stamato LProttoy HHiggins EScheifele LHamidi F(2024)Message in a Bottle: Investigating Bioart Installations as a Transdisciplinary Means of Community EngagementProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642339(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642339
Kale ALiu DAyala MSchwab HMcNutt A(2024)What Can Interactive Visualization Do for Participatory Budgeting in Chicago?IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345634331:1(415-425)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456343
Klasic MNelson KFleischman FLister C(2024)City Limits: Urban Nature Rules and the Role of Civic Engagement in Minneapolis—St. Paul Metro Area, USASociety & Natural Resources10.1080/08941920.2024.237828637:10(1471-1490)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2024.2378286
Umbelino GLu KEasterday M(2023)Increasing Inclusion and Time-Efficiency in Participatory Policy-Making Deliberations with E-Scribing TechnologyProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance10.1145/3614321.3614349(197-205)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3614321.3614349
Dove GShanley JMatuk CNov O(2023)Open Data Intermediaries: Motivations, Barriers and Facilitators to EngagementProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795117:CSCW1(1-22)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579511
McCord CBecker C(2023)Beyond Transactional Democracy: A Study of Civic Tech in CanadaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35794627:CSCW1(1-37)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579462
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents