Choices and compromises in the public consultation platforms’ design. A comparative study

The designs of digital platforms for public authorities result from particular choices of communication models and the dominant definitions of problems in a democratic order. The deficit of deliberation on public issues and the insufficient citizens' involvement in decision-making are among major concerns in contemporary democracies. Following it, several multi-tools platforms for public consultations have been designed as some remedy in recent years. But, even if the majority of their applications are local, their users and designers meet with challenges of reconciling the goals of large-scale yet reciprocal and reflexive participation that is conclusive and may contribute to political decisions. While platforms' designers address similar problems, they sometimes differ in solution proposals, depending on the know-how, choices in the situation of trade-offs between values, or institutional contexts. In our comparative study of five platforms currently being used by public authorities to facilitate the organization of consultations with citizens, we aim to analyse alternative paths to scaling-up civic participation in connection to the standards of deliberation. Accordingly, we pose the following research questions: (1) What approaches and particular tools have the platform's designers adopted to encourage popular participation? (2) How have the platform's designers planned to deal with the mass participation that would respect the standards of inclusive, reflexive, and consequential deliberation process? (3) How do the institutional contexts and designers' motivations contribute to particular technology choices? To answer these questions, we have analysed features and tools of the platforms next to in-depth interviews with eight platforms' designers (from one to four per platform). We have developed a detailed framework for platforms' analysis, and the results have been discussed with designers to ensure their accuracy. All platforms are open-source, while institutions or organizations have managed them as commercial or non-commercial projects. Some support linear processes, whereas others do not require organizers to go through predefined stages. Behind the linear organization of the process, there is a salient assumption that a platform provides guidance to institutional users or even controls their actions to avoid omitting critical procedural elements. While some platforms aim at enlarging the scale of participation by synchronizing offline and online processes designed as mini-publics, others prime asynchronous, easy to access communication with the use of algorithms to increase the reciprocity and reflexivity of discussions. Although all platforms apply solutions to allow for more straightforward conclusions drawing from a large amount of text, these features, mainly using algorithms and machine learning, are under development. Only one platform provides the visualization of proposals and arguments based on the structuration of the participants' input at the cost of some constraints to the flow of communication. It seems that if the platform is designed to operate on a large scale and for many different actors, it involves fewer process constraints but might require some compromise to deliberation.