In this paper, we introduce a system designed to track the social interactions of individuals seated around a table, such as during work sessions or breaks. The system employs sensor technologies and data processing algorithms to monitor the seating arrangement and identify patterns of social engagement among participants. This represents an initial step towards developing a comprehensive system that provides deeper insights into collaborative behaviours and interpersonal connections within organizational settings.

Digitally-supported participatory methods are often used in policy-making to develop inclusive policies by collecting and integrating citizen's opinions. However, these methods fail to capture the complexity and nuances in citizen's needs, i.e., citizens are generally unaware of other's needs, perspectives, and experiences. Consequently, policies developed with this underlying gap tend to overlook the alignment of multistakeholder perspectives, and design policies based on the optimization of high-level demographic features. In our contribution, we propose a method to enable citizens understand other's perspectives and calibrate their positions. First, we collected requirements and design principles to develop our approach by involving stakeholders and experts in policymaking in a series of workshops. Then, we conducted a crowdsourcing study with 420 participants to compare the effect of different text and images, on people's initial and final motivations and their willingness to change opinions. We observed that both influence participant's opinion change, however, the effect is more pronounced for textual modality. Finally, we discuss overarching implications of designing with empathy to mediate alignment of citizen's perspectives.

Abstract In recent years, new methods to engage citizens in deliberative processes of governments and institutions have been studied. Such methodologies have become a necessity to assure the efficacy and longevity of policies. Several tools and solutions have been proposed while trying to achieve such a goal. The dual problem to citizen engagement is how to provide policy-makers with useful and actionable insights stemming from those processes. In this paper, we propose a research featuring a method and implementation of a crowdsourcing and co-creation technique that can provide value to both citizens and policy-makers engaged in the policy-making process. Thanks to our methodology, policy-makers can design challenges for citizens to partake, cooperate and provide their input. We also propose a web-based tool that allow citizens to participate and produce content to support the policy-making processes through a gamified interface that focuses on emotional and vision-oriented content.