Factful

Abstract

While a government budget determines how taxpayers' money is allocated to various programs and stakeholders that compete for limited resources, the extensiveness and com plexity of the budget and its process hinder taxpayers from understanding the budget information and participating in the public discussion. To engage taxpayers in the public discus sion around budgetary issues, we leverage news articles con taining budgetary information for design opportunities. We present Factful, a web-based annotative article reading inter face that enhances the article with fact-checking support and contextual budgetary information by processing open gov ernment data. In our lab study, participants using Factful discussed more critically with more fact-based supporting statements. They built a rich context surrounding the rele vant budget facts beyond what was presented in the article. Factful presents a simple yet powerful model for support ing fact-oriented budgetary discussions online by leveraging open government data.

Crowdsourcing Perceptions of Fair Predictors for Machine Learning

“…Their results show that while these groups did not always agree on the perceived characteristics of treatment solutions, both clinical experts and non-experts saw benefits in the observation of non-expert contributions. Kriplean et al and Kim et al present online platforms to engage users in political discussion by including contextual, fact-checking, and social information layers, facilitating users to take the perspective of others in dividing issues [28,32]. Finally, we note emerging work on the use of crowdsourcing in algorithmic decision making.…”

Exploring stakeholder perceptions of tax reform failures and their proposed solutions: a developing country perspective

“…[TP4] Collaboration will also ensure that reform changes are not surprises to the business community and input from the ground level can help to create a sustainable environment. [TP3] Meaningful engagement with stakeholders can be challenging, particularly for complex issues such as government fiscal policies and budgets, which are generally harder for taxpayers to understand (Kim, 2022;Kim et al, 2015). Therefore, effective communication channels, such as using different print and digital media and information dissemination through socialisation programmes, are vital for meaningful stakeholder engagement.…”

Community Conversational

“…The field of HCI has recently witnessed a 'Civic Turn' [34] and a flourishing interest in the configuration of sociotechnical systems to support civic engagement and community action. Work in this space has included the creation of tools to help communities express local matters of concern [63,64], the use of crowdsourcing in city planning and management [16,43,49,50] and the design of voting technologies to facilitate local consultation and decisionmaking [36]. A common characteristic of this work is that it is founded and reliant upon collaboration with public authorities (e.g.…”

“…There are however examples of HCI research that have approached the issue of local decisionmaking with a different outlook. These include systems designed in response to notions of deliberative democracy [28,36,39,56,59] and research on discursive forms of civic engagement [14,15,20]. These works typically represent non-traditional and more deliberative means of political engagement, which have been described as 'not less democratic, but democratically different' [51,52].…”

“…through processes that are enabled by online platforms including social media [11,57,58] or through deliberation platforms [59,68]. However, it has been highlighted that online platforms tend to polarise views [44,47], or become 'echo chambers' [35] (c.f. [56]) of political viewpoints and competing claims.…”