Increasing Inclusion and Time-Efficiency in Participatory Policy-Making Deliberations with E-Scribing Technology

Citizens can increase openness, transparency, and accountability of institutions by taking part in face-to-face participatory policy-making deliberations, such as participatory budgeting assemblies. But for participants' contributions to influence policy outcomes, organizers need to capture and synthesize participants' input. Existing approaches are not inclusive for participants or require too much time from organizers. We designed e-scribing, a novel approach for capturing and synthesizing participants' input from face-to-face deliberations in real time by combining scribes with digital technology. To evaluate the approach, we built DeliberationWorks, a digital deliberation technology that helps scribes (a) capture proxy input (i.e., as participants) that is complete and accurate so that participants do not need to interact with technology themselves and (b) synthesize the discussion in real time using labels. We deployed DeliberationWorks with 5 scribes in two face-to-face deliberations with 8-10 participants and found that, on average, 82% of the input was captured mostly accurately. After one hour of training, scribes synthesized input within 10 minutes of the end of the deliberation. Our findings suggest that e-scribing makes participatory policy-making more inclusive by allowing participants to share their input without interacting with technology, and more time-efficient by reducing synthesis and training times for organizers.