COCTEAU: an Empathy-Based Tool for Decision-Making

TL;DR

COCTEAU is a novel empathy-based, gamified framework designed to enhance citizen-policy maker interactions, aiming to improve participatory policymaking and stakeholder engagement.

Contribution

The paper introduces COCTEAU, a new framework combining empathy and gamification to foster collaboration between citizens and policymakers.

Findings

Preliminary assessments with stakeholders show promising engagement.

Pilot results indicate increased empathy and understanding.

Framework supports innovative formats for academic conferences.

Abstract

Traditional approaches to data-informed policymaking are often tailored to specific contexts and lack strong citizen involvement and collaboration, which are required to design sustainable policies. We argue the importance of empathy-based methods in the policymaking domain given the successes in diverse settings, such as healthcare and education. In this paper, we introduce COCTEAU (Co-Creating The European Union), a novel framework built on the combination of empathy and gamification to create a tool aimed at strengthening interactions between citizens and policy-makers. We describe our design process and our concrete implementation, which has already undergone preliminary assessments with different stakeholders. Moreover, we briefly report pilot results from the assessment. Finally, we describe the structure and goals of our demonstration regarding the newfound formats and organizational aspects of academic conferences.