  Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community
consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for
attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees' feedback in
reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20
organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing
system that captures attendees' feedback in an inclusive manner and enables
organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in
addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback, we
modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to
provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then
automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees'
feedback and organizers' tags. The augmented transcript along with a
feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis
methods is incorporated into an interactive authoring tool for organizers to
write reports. From a field experiment at a town hall meeting, we demonstrate
how CommunityClick can improve inclusivity by providing multiple avenues for
attendees to share opinions. Additionally, interviews with eight expert
organizers demonstrate CommunityClick's utility in creating more comprehensive
and accurate reports to inform critical civic decision-making. We discuss the
possibility of integrating CommunityClick with town hall meetings in the future
as well as expanding to other domains.
