Heinz School Project Encourages Internet Democracy
Reprinted from Focus, Volume 32, No. 2, November 2002.
The explosion of the Internet and the web in the last 10 years has been responsible for spreading all types of things, from news and games to fan clubs to pornography. A group of Carnegie Mellon researchers is examining its potential to spread something radically different: democracy.
Led by professors Peter Shane and Peter Muhlberger of the Heinz School, researchers are systematically examining the concept of "deliberative democracy": What it means, who participates in it and how to use the Internet to systematically foster it.
Shane, a constitutional lawyer and former dean of Pitt’s law school, has long held an interest in fostering citizen participation in government. While at Pitt, he saw the Internet as having the potential to increase participation, but any meaningful study of the subject would need to proceed from expertise in instructional technology and social science as well as law. These needs led him to Carnegie Mellon and the Heinz School, where in April 2001 he founded InSITeS, the Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society, to provide a base for examining how technology can be and is used in society.
Deliberative democracy, which Muhlberger defines as "an attempt to get people to learn about and discuss political issues," is not a new concept; promoting it on the Internet is. One way this is being done within InSITeS is the Community Connections project. The main goals of Community Connections are to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue on the impact of IT on society, to develop frameworks for constructive civic debate and to educate policy makers and citizens about important issues.
This project has five main objectives: 1) to understand how and when people engage in political discussion; 2) to create a website to foster online discussion (www.cmu.edu/ cc); 3) to get people to use the website; 4) to study how people use the website; and 5) to distribute tools and software.
Some of the work is taking place in classes at the university (see sidebar). The Community Connections website includes discussion boards, an online library, a search engine and a database for Allegheny County residents to find their elected representatives, from the President to the local school board. Shane describes the site as "local focus, national prototype."
Carnegie Mellon hosted a landmark conference on Electronic Democracy on Sept. 20 and 21. The conference, conceived and organized by Shane, brought in speakers from different disciplines, including political science, law and communications, to discuss the effects of the Internet on public participation in civic discourse.
The conference explored a range of theoretical and practical topics, including who uses the Internet, what online democracy really means and how organizations have increased public participation in civic issues. Presenters came from academia, industry and government, and from as far away as Israel and the Netherlands. A total of 91 people from 38 organizations attended.
Muhlberger presented the results of the Community Connections study he conducted in Pittsburgh. By comparing the online versus face-to-face political discussion habits of 524 Pittsburgh residents, he found that online political discussion made up almost 10 percent of all political discussion, a "small but not negligible amount."
One issue which Muhlberger and others are looking at is the "digital divide," the possibility that access/lack of access to computer technology will widen the gaps between the haves and the have-nots.
One of Muhlberger’s most surprising findings was that educated homeowners, who would normally be counted among the haves, participated less in online discussion than was thought. While the reasons for this lack of participation were not evident from the study, the implications are disturbing. While researchers want to develop systems that will mitigate the effect of the digital divide, they want to do it by increasing the participation of the underrepresented, not decreasing the participation of others.
The conference presentations were not limited to research studies or theoretical analyses. Several organizations maintain online forums, and their descriptions of the forums were intriguing.
The League of Women Voters’ website is probably the best-known example. Its vision is to be the one-stop location where citizens post questions and candidates at all levels respond to those questions and to each other. While the website has not yet fully realized that goal, it remains one of the best sources for citizens seeking information about issues and candidates.
Several other groups have designed and conducted controlled on-line forums, such as e-thePeople.org, weblab.org and unchat.com.
The unchat.com website was designed with the viewpoint that useful deliberation is "structured speech," not free speech. Discussion is moderated, but the moderator participates in the discussion, and all participants periodically elect a new moderator. Unchat mimics informal aspects of face-to-face discussion, such as the ability to "whisper" a comment to a single person in the forum, or "shout" comments that bypass the moderator and interrupt the discussion. The number of shouts is limited, however, and using them may negatively affect a person’s chances to be elected moderator.
The benefits of the conference were farreaching. "The people who participated now consider themselves a network on this type of information," says Shane. They are working together to establish research priorities and links between academia and organizations that will implement these activities in the "real world." One pleasant surprise, he said, was that "the general objectives of academics and practitioners are basically identical."
The conference was just the beginning. Last month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a three-year, $2.1 million grant to researchers at Carnegie Mellon to develop tools and software to help citizens use the Internet to become informed participants in community issues. They want to develop a model that can be exported to other communities and organizations. The primary investigators are Shane, Muhlberger and Robert Cavalier, senior lecturer in the Philosophy department.
The grant money will be used to develop and test software to support a virtual meeting place. There are two main areas of research. Shane explains that the first involves questions of design, including: Do you moderate discussion? If so, how? What format is best to foster interaction – text/audio/other? How do you handle identifying people, and ensuring they are who they say they are? Design questions for an interactive website are "as complicated as the architecture for a skyscraper."
The second area of research revolves around social science issues. Does on-line deliberation happen? Under what conditions? How does it compare, in quality and quantity, to face-to-face discussions? The best-designed online forum will be a failure if no one bothers to use it.
Shane sees online forums possibly transforming civic interaction. Online hearings could replace public hearings, which traditionally are poorly attended.
He says he could "imagine a world in which a governmental body sets up an online citizens jury" to discuss a public issue. He even dares to hope, as far as the level of citizen involvement, that the online could be better than the real world.
-- MEG PAPA
Designing an Electronic Democracy
This semester, students in On-Line Information Design are addressing questions regarding the design of a website for the Heinz School project on online democracy. Typically, students in the graduate and undergraduate sections of English 76-487 and English 76-887 find a project where they define the users of the site they are designing. For the Heinz School project, "by definition, users are just about anyone," says Steve Kuhn, instructor in English and teacher of the undergraduate section of the class.
Students in the courses break into groups to address different questions of design: What should the online and printed material look like? How do you set up moderated discussion, from the viewpoint of the moderator and the participant? How do you design the survey form? How do you present the results of a deliberation to journalists and policymakers?
For example, students in the graduate section of the course taught by Christine Neuwirth, professor of English and HCII, approximated an audioonly online discussion by placing paper bags over part of the subjects’ heads, restricting their vision and reducing the amount of non-verbal clues each saw.
One group in Kuhn’s section observed how people read online news stories, using a process called "think-aloud": the people under observation are encouraged to vocalize their thoughts as they read a 600-word news article from either the USA Today or MSNBC websites.
The group chose six people: two each who described themselves as uninterested, somewhat interested and very interested in news issues. All six people lost interest after reading only a few paragraphs, claiming they were bored. This disconcerting finding raises questions on how information about issues can be distributed to people in an engaging way.
Another surprising finding was that people were more comfortable reading news stories written by people whose names they recognized and trusted. Since the majority of news writers, scientists and other information providers are not public personalities, this finding raises questions about how to get people to trust information given to them.
Neuwirth’s class also found that more interactivity doesn’t always mean quality deliberation. They approximated online deliberation with text only, audio-only, audio with still images and video. She said the studies showed that "if a video was being projected, [participants] were very self-conscious" and did not participate as much as with the other types of interaction.
The nearly 30 people in the two sections of On-Line Information Design are students majoring in information systems, design, human-computer interaction and English.
-- MEG PAPA