• DOI:10.1145/2702123.2702403
• Corpus ID: 5174753

Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere

@article{Semaan2015DesigningPD,
  title={Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere},
  author={Bryan C. Semaan and Heather A. Faucett and Scott P. Robertson and Misa Maruyama and Sara K. Douglas},
  journal={Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  year={2015}
}

• Bryan C. Semaan, Heather A. Faucett, +2 authors Sara K. Douglas
• Published 18 April 2015
• Political Science
• Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Little is known about the challenges and successes people face when piecing together multiple social media to interact in the online public sphere when: seeking information, disseminating information, and engaging in political discussions. We interviewed 29 US citizens and conducted 17 talk-out-loud sessions with people who were using one or more social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact in the online public sphere. We identified a number of challenges and workarounds related to public sphere interactions, and used our findings to formulate requirements for new political environments that support the interactions in the public sphere. Through evolving requirements generation, we developed a new political deliberation technology, dubbed Poli, which is an integrated social media environment with the potential to enable more effective interactions in the public sphere. We discuss several remaining questions and limitations to our tool that will drive future work.