Towards Understanding Desiderata for Large-Scale Civic Input Analysis

Advancement in digital civics and the emergence of online platforms have enabled vast amounts of community members to share their input on various civic proposals. The intricacy of the community input analysis process, coupled with the increased scale of community engagement, makes community input analysis particularly challenging. Civic leaders, who gather, analyze, and make critical decisions based on community input, struggle to make sense of large-scale unstructured community input due to lack of time, analytical skills, and specialized technologies. In this qualitative study, we investigated civic leaders' requirements that can accelerate the community input analysis process and help them to gain actionable insights to make better decisions. Our interviews conducted with 14 civic leaders revealed a dichotomous nature of requirements based on their roles and analysis practices. The interviews also revealed the civic leaders' desire to understand the community's opinions beyond sentiments and how text analysis and visualization can bring structure and enable sensemaking of community input. This study is our first step towards exploring the design of community input analysis technologies for civic leaders that can contribute to democratic decision-making in digital civics.