Voice to Vision: Enhancing Civic Decision-Making through Co-Designed Data Infrastructure

TL;DR

Voice to Vision addresses a core challenge in civic governance: translating community input into actionable planning outputs while maintaining trust. The authors describe a five-month, co-designed sociotechnical system that combines an interoperable data structure with dual interfaces—one for planners to perform sensemaking and one for the public to observe engagement and outcomes. Through planner studies and real-world field deployment, the work demonstrates improved transparency and legitimacy, while also underscoring persistent tensions between rigorous analysis, accessibility, and concrete actions. The study contributes a complete system, empirical insights from field use, and practical guidance for designing participatory civic platforms that support shared understanding across officials and communities, with implications for scalable, interoperable infrastructure in governance.

Abstract

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.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: A diagram of our design methodology involving planners and community members. Each design cohort has concentric circles representing different levels of involvement.
• Figure 2: The Voice to Vision landing page provides project context and overview to community members, serving as their first interaction with the community-facing platform. The landing page introduces the planning process goals and structure, orienting users before they explore specific community feedback and outputs. We blurred parts of the figure to maintain anonymity.
• Figure 3: Voice cards across both platforms. The sensemaking interface (a) provides editing capabilities for planners to categorize and connect feedback to planning outputs, while the community-facing platform (b) presents the same content in a read-only format that emphasizes transparency, and (c) displays uncited voices with rationales for why they are not tied to specific outputs.
• Figure 4: Output cards across both platforms. The top row shows the sensemaking interface's editable output cards used by planners (a, b), while the bottom row shows the community-facing platform's read-only presentations of the same content (c, d). Both implementations maintain consistent metadata fields and interactive visualizations of cited voices by topic.
• Figure 5: Visualizations in the sensemaking interface. The map visualization (a) reveals spatial relationships while the cluster visualization (b) highlights thematic connections across the voices.