There has been a growing interest in HCI in designing and developing technology to support democratic participation, particularly in the domain of urban planning or place-based research. In addition, the HCI field has increasingly considered the intersection of HCI and policymaking to understand how our research can have a broader impact. In this paper, we report on a series of workshops with citizens and city planners to explore place-based policymaking through the case study of neighbourhood planning in the UK. Our analysis highlights the tensions, opportunities and challenges faced by citizens in creating policy. Drawing from our findings, we stress the need for HCI to be actively involved in supporting, innovating and (re)designing civic policymaking processes while emphasising design considerations for the development of technological tools.

There is a growing public, political, and academic discourse around the idea that data has the potential to empower citizens. In particular, evidence-based policymaking is at the centre of national and regional planning processes. At the same time a shift towards Localism in planning means that while citizens and civic groups are centrally involved in decision-making about their communities, they lack the skills, resources and access to data that might inform their decision-making. There is a need to establish new ways of supporting deliberation and decision-making in local planning. We report a study that explores the role of data in the complex processes involved in consultation events and the broader collaborative processes surrounding them. In doing so we highlight the need for the integration of dialogic forms of participation with other locally produced data, and for this to be shared in ways that position data as a resource for action.

The development of platforms for community decision-making has been of growing interest to the HCI community, yet the ways technology might be woven into traditional consultation processes has been under-studied. We conducted fieldwork at consultation events where residents were invited to discuss and map assets related to their neighbourhoods to inform community decision-making. The fieldwork highlighted problems with equality, turn taking, the evidencing and elaborating on opinions by residents, and challenges related to capturing and documenting the events. We developed Community Conversational-a hybrid table-top game and digital capture and review platform-in response to these issues. Community Conversational was designed to provide a flexible structure to consultation events related to 'place', and support the production, capture and review of deliberative 'talk' to support decision-making. We study how the platform was used in two consultation events, and discuss the implications of capturing and evidencing local people's opinions for the accountability of decision-makers and community organisations.

Neighbourhood planning devolves power to communities to create their own planning policy but traditional forms of participation are still relied upon. And despite the ubiquitous nature of technology in society, digital participation methods are rarely used. In this paper, we outline fieldwork with two neighbourhood planning groups who used participatory media technology to improve engagement though the art of storytelling. We focus on the configuration of participatory media as a way to widen participation and enable story creation and sharing amongst citizens. We highlight that storytelling using media technology can provide a model of and a model for the way we "do" neighbourhood planning whilst emphasising the challenges of ensuring processes are linked to tangible actions and encouraging the multiplicity of stories.