The Stakeholder Perspective on Using Public Polling Displays for Civic Engagement

Public polling displays, i.e. interactive interfaces that offer questionnaires in public space, are promised to engage citizens in a dialog with civic stakeholders around local concerns. Although past studies revealed the core factors that impact their usability, little is known about whether civic stakeholders actually consider the deployment of public polling displays to be valuable. We therefore interviewed 12 members of 10 stakeholder organizations who engaged in four different real-world cases, and analyzed all the underlying activities that ranged from planning the deployments to interpreting the final polling results. We thus report on eight key challenges of public polling display deployments, among which: designing polls so that they are responsive, decisive and accessible yet also generate actionable insights, managing the trust of citizens and stakeholder organizations, and facilitating the accurate interpretation of the polling responses. By understanding the process of public polling display deployments from the perspective of civic stakeholders, we inform its continued evolution towards an opportunistic yet trustworthy civic engagement method.