Designing mobile interaction to elicit alternative solutions for participatory decision-making Ana Cristina B. Garcia ADDLabs/IC UFF Niterói, Brazil bicharra@ic.uff.br Adriana S. Vivacqua PPGI/DCC-IM UFRJ Rio de Janeiro, Brazil avivacqua@dcc.ufrj.br Thiago C. Tavares ADDLabs/TCC-IC UFF IBGE Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Abstract—Good decisions require good understanding of the problem, the context and available options. This knowledge, in general, is dispersed through several, frequently unidentified, individuals. Collecting, filtering and putting together the relevant knowledge pieces to create solutions are difficult tasks. Many domains fit this scenario of distributed knowledge and creative solution’s needs including governmental decision-making. Democratic governments constantly need to make sense of population demands to properly make decisions that attend overall will. However, low citizens participation in government decisions through democratic processes is an aspect that defies democracy itself. Large-scale citizens participation is difficult for the lack of technology to collect, filter and synthesize information. To deal with this problem, we developed an intelligent mobile network that allows broad citizens’ participation and feasible government action. Previous research indicates cellular phones as the device with the broadest acceptance in all Brazilian social classes. Sending messages and voting by cell phones are broken barriers to consider the device as the natural input interface for citizen-government interaction. Additionally, message summarization and clusterization help government understand the demands. In this paper we present mGov, a system for eliciting and answering citizen demands in a participatory government structure. A prototype has been deployed with good results. Keywords – collective intelligence; e-democracy; mobile intelligence I. INTRODUCTION Good decisions over complex or unknown situations often require knowledge spread through different individuals not necessarily identified. Finding solutions to global warming, violence in Rio or even effective technology to extract petroleum in ultra-deep waters are good examples for which knowledge is still unavailable in a structure and useful form. This is not a new research scenario, but certainly now is getting much researchers’ attention due to the increasingly open issues posed by modern society. An approach to deal with open problems is to develop argumentation tools to allow a large number of people to participate, discuss and contribute with creative suggestions. The key idea is to allow the appearance of new and unexpected ideas, given the problem has no known solution as in a creative design task. Eliciting solutions from a large number of people may lead to innovative options unthinkable by a smaller group of people. This notion is already adopted by proponents of participatory design, where people may participate in the design of public spaces. The idea of collective intelligence [15] to design new solutions creates new challenges, one of which is making sense of crowds: listening, understanding, interpreting, synthesizing, providing feedback and acting are some issues that must be addressed. Klein [13] proposed an argumentation network in which people share information and discuss over it. This approach only addresses the “collecting knowledge” issue. We are interested in approaching the entire problem of making sense of the crowd. Another approach has been proposed to address group decision making, involving the whole process, from idea generation to final decision, based on the Delphi method [5]. Participatory activities involve the creation of new participation channels between the organizers of the participatory process and the participants, creating forms of interaction between the two, such as referendums, opinion polls, negotiation of regulations, popular juries and focus groups, which in turn increase transparency and social participation [9][19]. Several issues make widespread participation hard: distance, location, lack of infrastructure, scheduling difficulties and political organization between cities are some of them. So the problem becomes enabling intense participation to support decisions through a participatory process. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) appear as a means to solve this problem. Its adoption strengthens the infrastructure and enables the creation of new communication channels. ICTs become important articulation points, as they provide information and services and enable participation. When well designed, this technology enables the creation of an environment where participatory activities may be fruitfully enacted. Involving the population in decisions is desirable, because it leads to an increase in confidence in the decision process, the construction of relationships based on trust, transparency and integrity, the identification of multiple interests and needs, and