A Sociotechnical Design and Evaluation Framework for Digital Democracy and Citizen Participation

This paper is the result of discussions and reflections following the INTERACT 2023 Workshop on HCI for Digital Democracy and Citizen Participation organised by Working Group 13.8 on Interaction Design for International Development. The workshop covered diverse case studies, experiences in this area including examples of decision-making in cooperatives, municipal budgeting, policy making, and citizen driven innovation. In this article we highlight the need for interdisciplinary collaboration uniting researchers, citizens, platform developers and policy makers with the goal of crafting a sociotechnical design and evaluation framework for platforms for Digital Democracy and Citizen Participation. So far there have been very few efforts at truly interdisciplinary evaluations and comparisons of such platforms. These efforts require a focus on the process and product of the design of such platforms to identify and assess the sociotechnical gaps between democratic requirements and digital affordances. To do this effectively we need to address questions such as how to identify and assess the nature and type of citizen participation in the process of design of these platforms? What are the best digital tools and methods to support communication, community formation and deliberation in democratic processes? How can different approaches towards systems design promote democratic participation, especially including underrepresented groups, helping bridge the digital divide in DPP? How should the design process be led by democratic requirements and not by technology affordances? The paper presents how these questions can be addressed in the context of a sociotechnical design process inspired by design thinking.