HCI, civic engagement and trust

Harding, Michael Paul and Knowles, Bran and Davies, Nigel Andrew Justin and Rouncefield, Mark Francis (2015) HCI, civic engagement and trust. In: CHI '15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing. ACM, pp. 2833-2842. ISBN 9781450331456

Abstract

There is a widespread belief that pervasive technologies will encourage and facilitate partnerships between citizens and civic authorities, enabling individuals to play a greater role in civic planning, service delivery and infrastructure management. However, at present sustained use and perceived value of civic engagement technologies remains low because the design space is poorly understood by system developers who focus almost exclusively on empowering citizens rather than adopting an informed, inclusive approach that addresses the needs of both citizens and civic authorities, and helps establish trusted relationships between these different stakeholders. We report on an extensive study of civic engagement in the domain of public infrastructure maintenance and provide insights into the civic management processes to support future design of trusted civic engagement interactions.