CommunityClick-Virtual: Multi-Modal Interactions for Enhancing Participation in Virtual Meetings

Abstract

Government officials often rely on public engagements to gauge people's perspectives on civic issues and gather feedback to make informed policy decisions. Traditional public engagement methods are often face-to-face, such as town halls, public forums, and workshops. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these approaches were rendered ineffective due to health risks and the engagement process saw a shift towards virtual meetings. While accessible to a broader audience, virtual public meetings introduced challenges around limited time and opportunity for attendees to share feedback. Furthermore, attendees were often required to identify themselves, potentially discouraging reticent attendees from speaking up and risking confrontations with other attendees. To mitigate this issue, we designed and developed CommunityClick-Virtual, a multi-modal companion web application that allows virtual meeting participants to provide feedback on meeting discussions silently and anonymously using six customizable options or through chat messages without the need to speak up.The organizers have access to all attendee feedback channels where they can use synchronized coordinated visualizations to gather a more holistic understanding of people's perspectives. The field deployments of CommunityClick-Virtual demonstrated its efficacy in increasing participation and enabling organizers to identify insights that could help them make more informed decisions. We argue that multi-modal systems such as Communityclick-Virtual can be pertinent in enhancing participation in both professional and educational environments.