Trust and transparency in civic decision-making processes, like neighborhood planning, are eroding as community members frequently report sending feedback “into a void” without understanding how, or whether, their input influences outcomes. To address this gap, we introduce Voice to Vision, a sociotechnical system that bridges community voices and planning outputs through a structured yet flexible data infrastructure and complementary interfaces for both community members and planners. Through a five-month iterative design process with 21 stakeholders and subsequent field evaluation involving 24 participants, we examine how this system facilitates shared understanding across the civic ecosystem. Our findings reveal that while planners value systematic sensemaking tools that find connections across diverse inputs, community members prioritize seeing themselves reflected in the process, discovering patterns within feedback, and observing the rigor behind decisions, while emphasizing the importance of actionable outcomes. We contribute insights into participatory design for civic contexts, a complete sociotechnical system with an interoperable data structure for civic decision-making, and empirical findings that inform how digital platforms can promote shared understanding among elected or appointed officials, planners, and community members by enhancing transparency and legitimacy.

Growing literature explores toxicity and polarization in discourse, with comparatively less work on characterizing what makes dialogue prosocial and constructive.We explore conversational discourse and investigate a method for characterizing its quality built upon the notion of "responsivity"-whether one person's conversational turn is responding to a preceding turn.We develop and evaluate methods for quantifying responsivity-first through semantic similarity of speaker turns, and second by leveraging state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to identify the relation between two speaker turns.We evaluate both methods against a ground truth set of human-annotated conversations.Furthermore, selecting the better performing LLM-based approach, we characterize the nature of the response-whether it responded to that preceding turn in a substantive way or not.We view these responsivity links as a fundamental aspect of dialogue but note that conversations can exhibit significantly different responsivity structures.Accordingly, we then develop conversation-level derived metrics to address various aspects of conversational discourse.We use these derived metrics to explore other conversations and show that they support meaningful characterizations and differentiations across a diverse collection of conversations.

Anonymity is a powerful component of many participatory media platforms that can afford people greater freedom of expression and protection from external coercion and interference. However, it can be difficult to effectively implement on platforms that leverage spoken language due to distinct biomarkers present in the human voice. In this work, we explore the use of voice anonymization methods within the context of a technology-enhanced civic dialogue network based in the United States, whose purpose is to increase feelings of agency and being heard within civic processes. Specifically, we investigate the use of two different speech transformation and synthesis methods for anonymization: voice conversion (VC) and text-to-speech (TTS). Through a series of two studies, we examine the impact that each method has on 1) the empathy and trust that listeners feel towards a person sharing a personal story, and 2) a speaker's own perception of being heard, finding that voice conversion is an especially suitable method for our purposes. Our findings open up interesting potential research directions related to anonymous spoken discourse, as well as additional ways of engaging with voice-based civic technologies.

Facilitation, or the craft and use of specific tools, methods, and practices to influence the way groups gather and converse to reach a goal, requires the nuanced craft of a facilitator to guide complex conversations. Online gathering spaces are often designed with neither the facilitator’s knowledge nor the range of tools their methods require, making online facilitation difficult. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Keeper – an online video call extension environment – informed by the widespread, foundational facilitation method of Circle practice. We define three initial facilitator-driven goals of the platform: 1) enable tone setting, 2) ease the practice and smoothness of online conversation, and 3) improve social presence. After a qualitative study with 72 participants, semi-structured interviews with facilitators, and an RCT with 100 participants, we observe improved tone setting and ease of conversation and suggest several ways to further pursue improved online conversation.