Mini-Public Approach for Co-Creation of Policy Knowledge

Abstract

Municipal governments often struggle to inform and engage citizens around local issues. Due to complexities of local politics and the diverse expressions in public and private spheres, citizens face a huge information barrier towards meaningful participation. To overcome such barrier, we explore a solution to provide citizens with clear, useful, and trustworthy information. We describe a method for creating crystallized public policy knowledge, called Community Issue Review (CIR). CIR is a structured deliberative process that use a citizen panel to conduct analysis of data relevant to a pending issue. We evaluated the use of CIR in real community policy analysis, and reported a number of observations for enabling collaborative decision analysis.