Dear All

In our previous post we introduced the Argument Visualisation and Tracking tool (AVT) and gave an overview of its main design concepts. In this post we take a closer look at one scenario of using the AVT.
The rationale for the AVT is grounded firstly in current e-participation research priorities, chief among them the need for technology that improves public participation in a range of democratic processes. Thus, ultimately, the aim of the AVT is to improve the efficiency, inclusiveness, openness, and accountability of democratic processes. This means that, in addition to developing the AVT tool and exploring how best to improve the readability of very large visualisations of arguments, we will investigate the mediating role that such large, Web-based debate maps can play in e-participation scenarios. In particular, we intend to investigate the method and practice of how relevant e-participation actors use the AVT tool in the policy-making process.
Here, we will focus on an e-participation scenario from the perspective of a Policy Analyst, who for the purpose of discussion we call Bernd Gröninger. We ask that you consider yourself to be Bernd, where you are responsible for running a consultation on a green paper. You have to facilitate the debate, make sense of the responses, make these responses generally available so that relevant stakeholders can understand how the debate is progressing and at the end of the process you need to report back to the relevant government agency on the responses received.
(To ensure authenticity, the consultation concerns an actual Green Paper consultation, “Copyright in the EU Knowledge Economy” published by the European Commission. The IMPACT project is using this consultation as legacy data to trial the whole IMPACT toolbox. Due to various resource restrictions we are using a selected set of questions in the Green Paper and selected set of responses.)
Currently we do not have a fully functional prototype IMPACT toolbox and AVT tool that can be used to demonstrate all of our design choices. To overcome this difficulty and also to ensure we are progressing in the right direction, we have put together a detailed description of how we expect you the policy analyst to use the tool.

Configuring the debate

Bernd Gröninger logs into the IMPACT toolbox and clicks on the AVT tool icon to configure the tool for this particular consultation.

• He creates a new “Debate Map” in the AVT called “Copyright in the EU Knowledge Economy”.
• He enters the specific Green paper issues into the system. Importantly, these then frame the subsequent debate, bounding what counts as a relevant response from stakeholders. 
• He creates a Group called “Copyright in EU Knowledge Economy debate contributors” and then creates accounts on behalf of each contributor to the debate (e.g. “Aston University [created by Bernd Gröninger]” and “BBC [created by Bernd Gröninger]”).

(Bernd then uses the IMPACT Argument Reconstruction Tool to help him extract the arguments from each contribution to the policy consultation and these are automatically available for the AVT.)

Publishing the debate map

Bernd then publishes the argument maps in the AVT so that the stakeholders are able to browse the debate complete with the contributions made so far during the consultation process. Below is the first Treemap showing the different sections of the Green Paper. The size of the rectangle indicates the aggregated arguments under each section. Indeed, Bernd can check on how the consultation is progressing by going to the main debate window in the AVT to see the density of arguments for each section of the green paper.

Clicking on a rectangle shows another Treemap of the specific questions asked under that section. Clicking on specific questions then shows a network diagram of all the arguments addressing that particular question.

Reporting on the consultation

The deadline for the consultation is reached and Bernd needs to write a report, the AVT tool will help him with this task by providing summary statistics of the responses to the Green Paper issues made by different stakeholders. Statistics might include identification of which where the most controversial and hotly contested issues in the debate.

We welcome any feedback as it relates to the steps outlined in the above scenario from the policy analyst’s perspective.

Regards
Ann

Ann Macintosh
Professor of Digital Governance
Co-Director Centre for Digital Citizenship
Institute of Communications Studies
The University of Leeds,
Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/staff/a.macintosh