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Collecting and Organizing Citizen Opinions: A Dynamic Microtask Approach and Its Evaluation

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 12051)

Abstract

Citizens’ opinions are important information resources for democratic local governments. Since a mere collection of opinions is not easy to analyze, the collected opinions should be organized, so that the governments can effectively analyze it. Recently, web-based public opinion collection systems have been widely used, but many of them merely implement traditional methods. For example, collecting opinions in web-based questionnaire still use free-text fields, and organizing the collected opinions remains a cumbersome task for the government staff. This paper explores a new design space and proposes a scheme where citizens take part in organizing and classifying opinions while answering the questionnaire. In the scheme, we collect citizen opinions in a structured form, with a microtask interface that changes the list of choices dynamically. Our system has been used by Tsukuba city for several real-world opinion-collection projects. Our experience so far shows that the scheme is effective in organizing the collected opinions for analysis.

Keywords

Information integration System development Civic-tech Public opinion data 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR16E3 including AIP challenge program and JST Mirai Program Grant Number JPMJMI19G8, Japan.

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Copyright information

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Faculty of Library, Information and Media ScienceUniversity of TsukubaTsukuba-shiJapan
  2. 2.Graduate school of Library and Media StudiesUniversity of TsukubaTsukubaJapan
  3. 3.Public Relations Policy DivisionTsukubaJapan

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