Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees' feedback in reports. In this project, we explore how interactive technologies can enable reticent particpants to have a voice in public meetings and how civic leaders can capture and reflect on public input from these participants.

Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing system that captures attendees' feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees' feedback and organizers' tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incorporated into an interactive authoring tool for organizers to write reports.

Mahmood Jasim
Pooya Khaloo
Somin Wadhwa
Amy X. Zhang
Ali Sarvghad
Narges Mahyar

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CommunityClick: Capturing and Reporting Community Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity

Best Paper Award, 23rd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 2020