Hello.
My name is Mahmood Jasim.
I'm a graduate student from the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Today, on behalf of my co-authors from UMass
and the University of Washington,
I will present our paper "CommunityClick--
Capturing and Reporting Community
Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity."
20 years into the 21st century, public engagement
continues to rely on traditional face-to-face consultation
methods, including town halls, public forums, and workshops.
However, these methods rarely provide opportunities
for inclusive participation, especially
for reticent attendees who do not
feel comfortable speaking up.
Furthermore, the organizers struggle
to facilitate the meetings and capture attendees' feedback
simultaneously.
To understand the attendees' and organizers' needs in town halls
and how computer-mediated technology can address these
needs, we conducted a formative study where we surveyed 66
attendees across three town halls in Amherst.
We found that 17% attendees did not
feel that they were able to share their opinions,
33% attendees did not like how town halls are organized,
and the majority of the attendees
were willing to use technology in town halls
to share their feedback.
We also surveyed 20 organizers who are experienced
in facilitating town halls across the United States,
and learned that the majority of the organizers cannot appoint
dedicated note-takers to record attendees' feedback due
to manpower and budget constraints.
They also mentioned switching between facilitating and taking
notes leads to missing critical feedback from attendees.
To address these issues, we designed and developed
CommunityClick, a system to capture and report
community feedback from town halls
to improve the inclusive inclusively of opinions
during the meeting and in meeting reports.
In CommunityClick, we modify iClickers
as a real-time response system to enable attendees to silently
and anonymously share their opinions
and allow organizers to annotate the discussion any time
during the meeting using customizable tags.
These attendees' feedback and organizers' tags
are synchronized with the automatically-generated meeting
transcript, divided into manageable segments.
We surface the main discussion topics
and apply a novel feedback-weighted text
summarization method that prioritizes
attendees' feedback when generating the meeting summary.
We integrate these components with an interactive interface
that helps organizers to explore and use
the augmented transcript to gain deeper insights from community
feedback, and write more comprehensive reports.
The interface consists of several components.
The title shows various media information about the town hall
meeting.
The organizers' tags can be used as filters to explore
the meeting discussion.
The most important topics follow that are
extracted from the meeting.
The timeline provides a chronological distribution
of organizers' tags that can be used to investigate
the flow of the discussion.
The interactive feedback-weighted summary
acts as an anchor to explore meeting discussion segments.
The rich text editor enables organizers to write reports
without the need to switch to a different text editor
application.
And finally, the augmented meeting transcript
provides the meeting discussion segments, each containing
the associated meeting discussion text,
the organizers' tags, relevant topic,
the duration of the segment, and the distribution
of attendees' feedback.
We deployed CommunityClick in a town hall
in Amherst, where we surveyed 20 meeting attendees regarding
their experience of using our system.
The results from the deployment suggest
that a quarter of the attendees did not
feel that they were able to share their thoughts in town
halls.
We also found that more attendees
thought they could voice their opinions using iClickers
compared to sharing their opinions by speaking up.
Perhaps more importantly, we found
that the reticent participants who are not
able to voice their opinions by speaking up in town halls
could share their opinions silently using iClickers.
We also interviewed eight expert meeting organizers
to evaluate the efficacy of our system.
Our thematic analysis of the interviews with the organizers
demonstrate that CommunityClick can
create a more inclusive platform to share opinions
in town halls.
Furthermore, the organizers could
benefit from using CommunityClick
to provide evidence of the attendee's reflections.
And finally, CommunityClick could help organizers
to author more comprehensive and accurate reports.
In the paper, we discuss how technologies
like CommunityClick can create an impact
on inclusive participation in town halls
if integrated alongside the current methods.
We also discuss future directions
to expand such system in other domains.
I thank you for joining our presentation.
I hope that this study has brought you
some insights and ideas, and I'm eager to continue
the discussion.