The Stakeholder Perspective on Using Public Polling Displays for Civic Engagement

Public polling displays, i.e. interactive interfaces that offer questionnaires in public space, are promised to engage citizens in a dialog with civic stakeholders around local concerns. Although past studies already revealed the core factors that impact their usability, little is known about whether these civic stakeholders actually consider the deployment of public polling displays to be valuable. We therefore interviewed 12 stakeholders who engaged in four different real-world cases, and analyzed all the underlying collaborative activities that ranged from planning the deployments to interpreting the final polling results. We thus report on eight key challenges, among which: designing polls that are responsive, decisive and accessible yet also generate actionable insights, managing the trust of participants as well as the expectations of stakeholders, and facilitating the accurate interpretation of the responses. By understanding the impact of public polling displays from the perspective of stakeholders who actually funded their deployment, we inform its potential evolution towards an opportunistic but also trustworthy civic engagement method.

ISBN:978-1-4503-9056-9

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open