The Magic Sauce: Practices of Facilitation in Online Policy Deliberation

Abstract

Online engagement in policy deliberation is one of the more complex aspects of open government. Previous research on human facilitation of policy deliberation has focused primarily on the citizens who need facilitation. In this paper we unpack the facilitation practices from the perspective of the moderator. We present an interview study of facilitators in RegulationRoom-an online policy deliberation platform. Our findings reveal that facilitators focus primarily on two broad activities: managing the stream of comments and interacting with comments and commenters-both aimed at obtaining high quality public input into the particular policymaking process. Managing the immediate goals of online policy deliberations, however, might overshadow long-term goals pf public deliberation, i.e. helping individuals develop participatory literacy beyond a single policy engagement. Our contribution is twofold: we unpack the practice of human facilitation in online policy deliberation, and suggest both design and process implications for sustainable growth of civic engagement environments beyond the individual case we analyze.

Human-Machine Collaboration for Content Regulation

“…Our analysis shows that identifying tasks that should be automated and configuring tools to perform those tasks is crucial for Reddit moderators' ability to maintain their communities, especially as the communities grow large. This finding is consistent with Epstein and Leshed's observation that automation of maintenance tasks like detecting and addressing incivility have been critical to scaling up the RegulationRoom 23 deliberation environment [31]. While automation is crucial to support the growth of online communities, accurate automated detection is not an easy task.…”

“…It is critical for these tools to attain this balance to ensure that unintended post removals are avoided and at the same time, the workload of human moderators is substantially reduced. We echo calls by previous studies for building systems that ensure that the interactions between automation and human activities foster robust communities that function well at scale [31,35,97].…”

“…Some prior research has explored the work of moderators [5,29,31,69,97,111]. For example, Epstein and Leshed studied how moderators facilitate public deliberations on RegulationRoom, an online platform for policy discussions, and found a strong need to automate more of the moderators' work [31]. Diakopoulos and Naaman studied regulation of online news comments on the website SacBee.com [29].…”

The Impact of Facilitation on the Quality of Deliberation and Attitude Change

“…The chair is in charge of applying the procedural rules and leading discursive interactions, the moderator evaluates contributions, rationalizes communication, and controls the participants’ emotions, whereas the role of the mediator is to aggregate opinions, seek solutions, and summarize results, and “the most appropriate role for an intermediary in deliberation is that of a facilitator” (Landwehr, 2014, p. 87), who has the task of helping the group achieve the goals and ensuring that all voices, arguments, and points of view are heard (Landwehr, 2014). Other authors (Epstein & Leshed, 2016; Ryfe, 2006) describe facilitation mostly as a process that enables and guides participants to engage meaningfully and effectively in deliberative discussions. More specifically, the role of facilitators is to set up rules for discussion, assure meaningful exchanges among participants, strive for the equality of participants, their voices, arguments, and internal deliberative quality, offer a balanced summary of the discussion, and help in obtaining results (Moore, 2012; Park, 2012; Trénel, 2009).…”

Collaborative е-Rulemaking, Democratic Bots, and the Future of Digital Democracy

“…The platform was designed to allow participants to express their opinions and create a joint document that reflected the opinions of the group, providing space for minority and dissenting views as well. In contrast to other platforms, such as RegulationRoom, we did not use intensive intermediation to facilitate and mentor effective commenting [59][60][61]. We did not assist the participants in summarizing the discussion, nor did we intervene in the process of drafting and editing the joint document.…”