Defining public deliberation
In order to design an online public deliberation platform one needs to operationalize the concepts hiding in the background. For the team of developers, economists and business managers I have collaborated with this was a difficult task that went beyond feature discussion
The art and science of Expert Interviews
Our approach
The detailed analysis at the back of this research can be found here. There were 2 difficult problems here: identifying the experts in e-deliberation and designing a short enough and informative survey for the sole purpose of design. Together with the team, I developed a database of existing e-deliberation platforms or in their absence, of platforms which could technically serve as e-deliberation platforms and listed the product owners. Then we selected journal articles on the topic of e-deliberation (this was not trivial, since the topic is quite new and multidisciplinary) and made a list of possible experts who might answer our survey. In the mean time, I was leading the team through the operationalization process, which meant disentangling complex concepts such as e-democracy, e-participation and translating them into design problems. The operationalization also meant differentiating between various degrees of participation and types of deliberation and translating them into design problems.
