Designing mobile interaction to elicit alternative solutions for participatory decision-making

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 electronic