Hi all, We are organizing a pre-conference at ICA about participatory policy-making. Please see the call below, and let us know if you have any questions. best, Tanja CALL FOR PAPERS: 2017 International Communication Association Preconference *The challenges and promises of participatory policy-making: Communication practices, design considerations and socio-technical processes.* Hosted by: CalIT2, UC San Diego Supported by: CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, UC Berkeley Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago Co-sponsored by: ICA Communication and Technology Division ICA Communication Law and Policy Division Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) May 25, 2017 | San Diego, CA Room 5302, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego *Extended abstracts due: January 18, 2017* *Final manuscripts due: April 24, 2017**Submit at: **http://tinyurl.com/ica2017policy <http://tinyurl.com/ica2017policy>* Tied to the ICA ’17 conference theme of interventions, this pre-conference asks to unpack how the socio-technical design of online civic engagement in policy-making may “alter and disrupt” democratic processes, practices, and occurrences. As such it explicitly deals with “communication practices that engage with a political event, social phenomena, industrial or socio-cultural practice.” The growth of online tools for civic engagement has ignited the imagination of researchers and practitioners of democratic participation. The internet harbored great promise for cheaper, broader and more inclusive public engagement in politics through self organization, dissemination of information, and transparency. It has also harbored a promise to disrupt the ways government interacts with its citizens through open data, provision of services or engagement of citizens in policy deliberation and crowdsourcing. Interactive, informed, and meaningful civic engagement in government decision-making processes has been viewed as the pinnacle of participatory government efforts. In the US, on his second day in the office, President Obama addressed senior staff and cabinet secretaries, urging them to “find new ways of tapping the knowledge and experience of ordinary Americans.” In Iceland, the government used crowdsourcing in drafting a new constitution. Locally, municipalities experiment with combining both online and offline methods to engage members of the public in participatory budgeting exercises. In the area of internet governance, remote participation has been an important component in efforts to develop effective arrangements for multistakeholder deliberations and decision-making. There is a variety of activities that fit under the broad umbrella of civic engagement or e-participation in policy-making. Those range from purely consultative engagements such as virtual town halls, through policy ideation and crowdsourcing, to binding decision making such as participatory budgeting, rulemaking or the development of internet standards. While significant focus has been placed (in both research and practice) on technological solutions involved in effective online civic engagement in participatory and direct democracy activities, less attention has been paid to the systemic understanding of how these technological solutions interact with the social, political, institutional, and educational arrangements of such engagements and their potential to disrupt and alter traditional democratic practices. This pre-conference focuses on unpacking the black box of online civic engagement for planning and policy-making activities from a systemic perspective. We invite competitive submissions of empirical analysis, case studies, and conceptual work that review the continuum of offline and online participation arrangements through a socio-technical systems lens—an interaction between human participants, institutional arrangements, and affordances of online participatory tools. We envision this workshop as a boundary searching—or boundary expanding—exercise that will tackle three major aspects of research of online civic engagement: (a) conceptual and theoretical work for describing and analyzing the socio-technical nature of online participatory policy-making tools, (b) methodological approaches to studying those phenomena with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and system design, and (c) cases and datasets that invite and enable systemic analysis of both tools and social, political, institutional, and educational arrangements as they traverse both online and offline environments. Our goal is to engage with scholarship on digital divide, online cooperation, informed participation, psychology, internet governance, and computer mediated communication, in order to inform research on civic engagement that goes beyond the analysis of solely technical aspects of platform design and data mining. Theoretical areas and empirical contexts may include but are not limited to: - Conceptual and empirical work on participatory and crowdsourced policy-making. - Empirical case studies of the use of online ideation and participatory tools in rulemaking, participatory budgeting or internet governance deliberation. - Studies of controversies, successes, and failures in technology-driven participatory civic engagement. - Conceptual and empirical explorations of socio-technical considerations in the design of participatory platforms. - Analysis of interactions between offline and online processes and practices of policy-making. - Unpacking of tensions between expert and citizen knowledge and authority in policy deliberation. - Discussions of contextual factors that influence online civic engagement in policy-making (e.g., digital divide, literacy, motivation, political efficacy). *Submission details* At this time we invite authors to submit extended abstracts (800-1000 words) that describe the main thesis, research goals, and to the extent possible, the methodological background and findings of their paper. All extended abstracts must be uploaded through EasyChair at http://tinyurl.com/ica2017policy by 18 January 2017, with all identifying information removed. All contributions will be blindly peer-reviewed, and acceptance notifications will be sent out before the end of February 2015. Authors of the accepted abstracts will be asked to submit a full original manuscript of approximately 4000 to 8000 words, which has not been published elsewhere, by 1 May 2016. *Pre-conference logistics* The preconference will take place on Thursday, 25 May 2017 in Room 5302, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego. Presenters are expected to register for the pre-conference, but registration is open to both presenters and non-presenters. At the moment, the registration fees stand at 25 USD. *Timeline* - Extended abstracts due by January 18 (via EasyChair) - Notifications sent by Feb. 24 - Full paper drafts due by May 1 *Organizing Committee* - Brandie Nonnecke, PhD, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, UC Berkeley (Questions or concerns? Please email nonnecke@berkeley.edu) - Dmitry Epstein, PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago - Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, Stanford University Dr. Tanja Aitamurto Postdoctoral Scholar Management Science & Engineering Stanford www.tanjaaitamurto.com