PolicyScape

Abstract

Public policy can affect a diverse range of social groups in different ways. Therefore, understanding their perspectives is important for the citizens to form opinions on the policy. This work presents the idea of sharing and exploring citizens' perspectives on public policy using the concept of policy stakeholders. By doing so, I aim to support citizens to consider how the policy affects themselves and the other social groups. Findings from a pilot study showed that asking citizens about their identities as stakeholders led them to share opinions more persuasive to others. I implemented the idea as PolicyScape, an online platform for sharing and exploring citizens' perspectives on public policies with citizens’ identities as policy stakeholders. The user of PolicyScape can share their perspective on the policy along with their stakeholder identities as tags. The user can also browse the perspectives of others with tags describing stakeholder identities. An online experiment with 151 participants showed that the participants can share diverse and valid perspectives on public policies with PolicyScape. Comments from the participants showed that the collected stakeholder perspectives could help participants forming their opinions on the policies.