Community Conversational: Supporting and Capturing Deliberative Talk in Local Consultation Processes

The development of platforms for community decision-making has been of growing interest to the HCI community, yet the ways technology might be woven into traditional consultation processes has been under-studied. We conducted fieldwork at consultation events where residents were invited to discuss and map assets related to their neighbourhoods to inform community decision-making. The fieldwork highlighted problems with equality, turn taking, the evidencing and elaborating on opinions by residents, and challenges related to capturing and documenting the events. We developed Community Conversational-a hybrid table-top game and digital capture and review platform-in response to these issues. Community Conversational was designed to provide a flexible structure to consultation events related to 'place', and support the production, capture and review of deliberative 'talk' to support decision-making. We study how the platform was used in two consultation events, and discuss the implications of capturing and evidencing local people's opinions for the accountability of decision-makers and community organisations.