Building digital participation hives : toward a local public sphere

The so-called Web 2.0 has been an incubator for a number of initiatives and for several social networking sites that collect citizens’ remarks and suggestions on the state of public spaces, on the quality of public services, and on public officials’ activities, and that include facilities to enable participants’ aggregation around civic causes. All these initiatives encourage basic civic engagement, but the way they are designed and managed hampers their evolution toward higher levels of citizen involvement in (online) deliberative processes. This study analyzes some Web 2.0 civic websites and identifies three key design factors that hinder the growth of civic participation toward more significant levels. It goes on to propose design guidelines for online social interaction systems that—alongside existing grassroots spaces—act as hives to collect and coalesce “civic” pollen (information, reported problems, ideas, opinions, participants) from various web sources into trustworthy online participation environments that foster deliberation.