DeliberationWorks: A Deliberation System for Developing Capacities in Civic Organizing

Civic technologies have helped activists mobilize large groups of people to complete simple actions like sharing a post on social media or signing an online petition. While mobilizing large numbers of people to complete low effort actions is important, mobilizing does not develop peoples' capacities to organize, which requires moving people up an engagement ladder to interdependently work with others on increasingly complex and challenging collective actions. Research on civic organizing suggests that deliberating with others about what collective actions to plan and complete is key to developing people's capacities to organize. In this paper, we explore whether deliberation can help organizers support potential activists in moving up the organizing engagement ladder. DeliberationWorks, a computer-supported deliberation system presents potential activists with background information on collective actions and intrapersonal deliberation questions, facilitates group discussion with experienced organizers, and prompts activists to fill out action plans for completing actions. Findings across two field deployments suggest that DeliberationWorks effectively helped organizers support potential activists in increasing their knowledge and interest in taking collective action, as well as successfully planning actions. Yet our findings also present a complex picture of additional learning challenges organizers encounter in deepening potential activists' engagement with organizing beyond the deliberation. We present four distinct engagement journeys based on participants' experiences during and after the deliberation to inform the design of future socio-technical interventions for moving potential activists further up the ladder. Our findings suggest that future systems designed to develop people's capacities to organize should help organizers invest in potential activists' capacities to increase engagement in the organization through 1-1 coaching and follow-up communications, based on understanding of their interests and needs from the deliberation. We contribute a novel approach that leverages organizing theory to design deliberation features to support organizers in increasing people's engagement with organizing, as well as evidence collected across two case study deployments that contribute a deepened understanding of new potential activists' needs in getting started with organizing.