Public Participation in Analytic-Deliberative Decision Making: Evaluating a Large-Group Online Field Experiment

Abstract

This article reports an evaluation of the quality and scale of interactions during an online field experiment. A large number of individuals (n= 179) worked with an online public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) platform during a month-long field experiment about regional transportation improvement decision making in the central Puget Sound area of Washington. The system platform logged more than 120,000 client–server interaction events. We developed a geovisual analytic technique called a grapevine to evaluate the quality and scale of public participation using event log data. The grapevine 4D space–time geographic information system (GIS) visualization helps distinguish productive clusters of analytic-deliberative process and for guiding content analysis of the user-generated discussion. Comparison of the nature and content of participant message exchanges before and after GIS-based analytic activities revealed a significant shift in focus. We characterize this shift in the focus of deliberation as the result of participants sharing their lay expertise, in the form of simplifying assumptions, to cope with the technical details of the GIS-based analysis and move the large group toward agreeing on a transportation package for the region. The article concludes by extending the implications of the research with a three-part framework called participatory interaction modeling, wherein geographically distributed networks of designers and developers, participant users, and social and behavioral science evaluators learn how to create PPGIS capabilities that can better address societal goals.