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

2024-09-24

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Existing policy design approaches are predominantly top-down and disconnected from community contexts, resulting in low legitimacy and misalignment between policy provisions and actual stakeholder needs. Method: This paper introduces PolicyCraft—a human-computer interaction (HCI)-informed system that embeds real-world cases as negotiation anchors within the policy design workflow. It supports participatory governance through case annotation, structured deliberation, multi-round voting, and versioned collaborative editing, enabling stakeholders to co-author, critique, and iteratively refine policy proposals while dynamically aligning abstract rules with concrete situational constraints. Contribution/Results: Evaluated in two university courses focused on educational policy, groups using PolicyCraft achieved significantly higher consensus and produced policies substantiated by richer, more relevant case evidence—outperforming a baseline system lacking case-based scaffolding. The work advances participatory policy design by grounding abstraction in lived experience and demonstrates scalable HCI methods for democratic, context-sensitive governance.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

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.

Problem

• collaborative policy design
• participatory approaches
• case-grounded deliberation

Innovation

• Case-grounded deliberation structure
• Collaborative policy proposal system
• Enhanced consensus through concrete cases