#18 · During the Assembly
How to build upon valuable ideas over time, and not lose them on the go? How to enhance transparency and traceability? How to develop process-oriented archives that can be made publicly accessible?
CCAs are intended as generative processes in which a variety of ideas emerge, and are analysed, and reflected upon over time. These ideas may grow and transform during the dialogic process by incorporating diverse perspectives and knowledges (e.g., “expert”, situated, indigenous). However, due to various reasons, including limited documentation and the complexity of deliberation and translation of ideas into recommendations, not everything shared finds its way into the publicly accessible outcomes of CCAs, or appears only in flattened versions.
Storing and sharing these emerging ideas, opinions, and proposals throughout the entire CCA process supports the collective elaboration of proposals and conclusions while mitigating the risk of misinterpreting results. Approaches that continuously make ideas visible and accessible, such as designerly tools (e.g. collective mapping, scenario building, games, and graphic recordings), interim tangible outputs (e.g. booklets and zines), and structured knowledge mapping, can enable participants to contribute directly to the documentation and explanation of ideas in a shareable way, not only at the end of the CCA process, and also help to link contributions across sessions.
Use Graphic Recording to support shared understanding and processes by visually capturing and syntesising discussions in real time.
Provide tangible outputs (e.g. booklets or zines) that share emerging insights and enable participants to appropriate and build upon them, as well as elaborate new ideas across participatory sessions.
Combine Transactive Memory approaches to support collective knowledge building with visual representations of idea-building through Knowledge Mapping.
Use digital tools like Pol.is to map “high dimensional opinion spaces” and support synthesis by identifying patterns across perspectives.
DemNext proposes to deploy AI-powered sensemaking and visualisation of relationships to enable visible connections between small group conversations and plenaries discussions and enabling faster synthesis, and to develop publicly accessible and visual archives to document the deliberation process, by grounding outputs in citizens’ voices, making them reusable and available to a broader public.
Schoffelen, J., & Huybrechts, L. (2013). Sharing is caring. Sharing and documenting complex participatory projects to enable generative participation. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal, 18, p. 9-22.
Bjorkegren, M., Erkkilä, T., Shaw, L., & Megill, C. (2021). Polis: Scaling deliberation by mapping high dimensional opinion spaces.
Busch, M.W., von der Oelsnitz, D. (2010). Collective Intelligence in Teams – Practical Approaches to Develop Transactive Memory. In: Bastiaens, T.J., Baumöl, U., Krämer, B.J. (eds) On Collective Intelligence. Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, vol 76. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14481-3\_9
