Development of a Meeting Browser towards Supporting Public Involvement

This paper presents novel methods for support for browsing a long meeting record towards supporting public involvement. Facilitating public involvement in the consensus building process for community development needs a lot of effort and time for sharing context and concerns among citizens and stakeholders. A record of public meeting often becomes too long to overview and to understand for people who did not participate in it. The two issues we addressed relate to how to best provide support for these people. First, support for overviewing the changes in a long meeting to track and to find intended arguments. Second, support for understanding the background of arguments. The approaches to the issues are first, to visualize the transition of topics in the meeting, and second provide information related to a transient topic specified by a user. The meeting browser we developed is designed on the basis of Visual Information-Seeking Mantra, "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand." To visualize a dynamic topic flow, a graph for visualizing the topic transition, SalienceGraph is used to track the dynamic transition of the salience of a word. To visualize related information, the search engine based on SalienceGraph retrieves passages related to a transient topic from past meeting records or documents. These approaches support citizens and stakeholders to find, to track, and to understand a target argument from a long meeting record.