Crowdsourcing perspectives on public policy from stakeholders

Abstract

Personal deliberation, the process through which people can form an informed opinion on social issues, serves an important role in helping citizens construct a rational argument in the public deliberation. However, existing information channels for public policies deliver only few stakeholders' voices, thus failing to provide a diverse knowledge base for personal deliberation. This paper presents an initial design of PolicyScape, an online system that supports personal deliberation on public policies by helping citizens explore diverse stakeholders and their perspectives on the policy's effect. Building on literature on crowdsourced policymaking and policy stakeholders, we present several design choices for crowdsourcing stakeholder perspectives. We introduce perspective-taking as an approach for personal deliberation by helping users consider stakeholder perspectives on policy issues. Our initial results suggest that PolicyScape could collect diverse sets of perspectives from the stakeholders of public policies, and help participants discover unexpected viewpoints of various stakeholder groups.