Investigating Incidence of Common Ground and Alternative Courses of Action in an Online Forum Jess Kropczynski, PhD, Guoray Cai, PhD, and John M. Carroll, PhD College of Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA Telephone number, incl. country code JessK@psu.edu, Cai@ist.psu.edu, JCarroll@ist.psu.edu ABSTRACT Online forums support civic discourses on local politics, but it is not clear whether they generate decision-relevant outcomes. Using deliberative democracy as a theoretical lens, this paper proposes a coding scheme for understanding the progress of citizens’ deliberation through content analysis from a naturally occurring online discussion of a local planning project. By comparing patterns of this online discourse with normative views of deliberative dialogues, we found that important indicators of the deliberative ideal are missing. Our results show that citizens were not able to move towards advanced phases of deliberation as prescribed by deliberative democracy theory; and explain why it failed to develop common ground and joint assessment of alternative courses of action. We further explore possible causes of such patterns and identified a number of barriers that make online discussions less optimal to achieve common ground and collective judgment. Based on such findings, we suggest ways to improve deliberative outcomes by introducing active facilitation and advanced information support. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.3 Communications Applications; H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces General Terms Human Factors, Theory, Design. Keywords Planning, Democratic Deliberation, Citizen Decision-Making. 1. INTRODUCTION Planning is a major function of governments that involves making difficult choices influenced by a complex web of social, political, economic, and environmental forces [31]. Local governments are motivated to explore issues and solutions together with citizens in order to make smart choices for collective good [34]. Both government and grassroots organizations desire public involvement in planning, but meaningful public participation in urban planning remains an elusive goal despite decades of verbal commitment by the decision-makers in governments [24]. Given the limitations of traditional participation forums (e.g., town hall meetings, citizen study circles) in supporting broad- based participation, planners and decision-makers increasingly turn to online forums as a complementary or alternative venue of engagement with citizens [27, 36]. Such efforts have been deeply influenced by the discursive democracy tradition where deliberation and dialogue among a community are believed to have a transformative effect on public opinion [2, 4, 7, 10, 11]. However, it is not clear if simply having a forum to talk will generate public opinion as an outcome [10, 11, 22]. More studies are needed to understand how citizens utilize online forums to discuss planning issues and how such forums can be improved to create decision-relevant results. The extent to which established online systems for community news and discussion move through a deliberative process has not been previously tested. By identifying patterns of language used by communities to coordinate common ground and courses of action [28, 39] in a naturally occurring discussion, we aim to identify the opportunities and barriers to citizens’ ability to move toward advanced stages of deliberation. This paper contributes to the literature by seeking answers to the following research questions: (1) do citizens naturally develop common ground and consider alternative courses of action to a particular plan? (2) How do community members typically progress and advance through normative phases of deliberation in an online dialogue? In order to answer the above questions, we conducted a detailed study of an online public discussion forum centered on a local planning project. In order to assess the deliberative quality of this public forum, we performed a content analysis using a theoretical lens based on the deliberative democracy ideal. This theory, recognizes five distinct but consecutive phases of deliberation, with later phases building on the outcome of earlier phases. We developed a coding schema that has close correspondence to the five-phase model of deliberation (see section 2.2) and apply this coding scheme in analyzing forum content. Our goal is to identify patterns of public opinion formation according to the deliberative ideal. Our analysis focuses on discovering two important indicators of advanced deliberation: (1) we identify signs (in the speech-acts of the online conversations) where citizens build common ground with one another, and (2) we identify signs where citizens generate and evaluate alternative courses of action. Our results show that naturally occurring community conversations did not achieve higher-level phases of deliberation, “common ground” and “community evaluated alternative courses of action.” From this observation, we identified a set of barriers and opportunities to improve online deliberative forums, such as (1) enabling users to identify common topics among comments; Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. 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