Community Interface Design to foster the Political Engagement of Citizens: What can we learn from groupware experiences

Peter Mambrey
Fraunhofer-FIT Institute for Applied Information Technology

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     Last modified: April 2, 2005

Abstract
Web-based systems for participation and deliberation have to be constructed according to existing norms for HCI assuring the usability and barrier-free access to serve citizens. New challenges emerged supporting groups or communities as a whole and not only the individual user. This requires new innovative solutions for community interface design which goes beyond the support of the individual.

Our objective is applying community ware to establish, maintain, and further develop communities of citizens to foster social and political interaction. This includes the design, implementation and evaluation of prototypical tools for community support for visualization, knowledge-sharing, awareness, navigation, polling, and rating.

We have to go beyond the individual users’ needs and develop generic socio-technical tools to build, maintain and foster digitally networked communities. Information technology is now firmly entrenched in our lives. One needs to combine the individual user’s perspective – usability as given (ISO/IEC 9126; ISO/IEC 13407; ISO/IEC 9241) – with the perspective of the collaboration process leading towards cooperativity. Cooperativity focuses on the mutual effects of collaborating actors and the support for cooperation and coordination. This includes the impacts that actions of an individual user may have on other users. In particular, the support for users to become aware of other users’ actions and to anticipate the effects of their own actions on other users. Effective networking and collaboration in virtual communities require flexible socio-technical support well attuned to emerging tasks and processes. Communities must be assisted in sharing expertise and knowledge.

In the paper we will discuss the socio-political context as well as present tools and services to build and maintain citizen communities in the Web (self-organized and facilitated). Some of these tools are already in use in a groupware “Basic Support of Cooperative Work” http://bscw.fit.fhg.de and evaluated others are prototypes.