HCC: Small: Tools and Mechanisms to Support Civic GeoCampaigns

This project will create software infrastructure and sociotechnical mechanisms that let agencies engage the efforts of citizens in order to gather data and even take on small tasks in their local communities. Realizing this aim requires filling significant technological gaps: (1) no robust software infrastructure that enables a broad range of community activities, (2) no general set of incentive mechanisms that organizers can use to attract and motivate citizen participation, and (3) no software tools for organizers to monitor effectiveness and make necessary adjustments.

This project takes on these challenges through research on four central topics. First, it will create a general ontology of tasks, coordination mechanisms, incentives, and user interfaces for organizers to define goals. Second, it will develop algorithms to match participants and tasks, and user interfaces for participants to find tasks of interest. The third topic is automated mechanisms and visualization tools for organizers to monitor progress and adjust parameters such as incentives or participation qualifications. Fourth, it will create interfaces for participants to visualize their contributions and view incentives they have earned or are eligible to earn, based on techniques to model users based on their participation. The technical results will be embodied in a software infrastructure which will be deployed and used as a platform for empirical evaluation of the developed algorithms and interaction techniques.

The key scientific outcomes of this project will be a general and integrated software infrastructure for social participation efforts, a diverse catalog of incentive mechanisms and guidelines for use, a novel set of task matching and participant recruiting techniques, automated and semi-automated techniques to monitor and dynamically adjust progress, and empirical knowledge of how these novel algorithms and interaction techniques work in practice.

The infrastructure developed through this research has great potential for enabling local government agencies to gather much more, accurate, and timely data to inform their decisions. It also can help citizens to become involved with their communities, finding constructive tasks to take on that require differing amounts of skill and time commitments. An even broader potential impact is that the products of this research can help renew the relationship between local governments and citizens, making government more responsive to citizens and giving citizens greater faith in their governments.