PolicyCraft: Supporting Collaborative and Participatory Policy Design through Case-Grounded Deliberation

TL;DR

PolicyCraft is a system that facilitates collaborative policy design by structuring deliberation around concrete cases, leading to greater consensus and better-supported policies in educational settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces PolicyCraft, a novel system that leverages case-grounded deliberation to enhance participatory policy design and consensus-building.

Findings

Students using PolicyCraft achieved higher consensus.

PolicyCraft led to better-supported policies.

Concrete case discussion improved policy legitimacy.

Abstract

Community and organizational policies are typically designed in a top-down, centralized fashion, with limited input from impacted stakeholders. This can result in policies that are misaligned with community needs or perceived as illegitimate. How can we support more collaborative, participatory approaches to policy design? In this paper, we present PolicyCraft, a system that structures collaborative policy design through case-grounded deliberation. Building on past research that highlights the value of concrete cases in establishing common ground, PolicyCraft supports users in collaboratively proposing, critiquing, and revising policies through discussion and voting on cases. A field study across two university courses showed that students using PolicyCraft reached greater consensus and developed better-supported course policies, compared with those using a baseline system that did not scaffold their use of concrete cases. Reflecting on our findings, we discuss opportunities for future HCI systems to help groups more effectively bridge between abstract policies and concrete cases.