Going the Distance: Trust Work for Citizen Participation

Trust is a vital component of citizen participation—whether citizens decide to engage in opportunities for participation in local government can hinge entirely on the existence of trust between citizens and public officials. Understanding the role of trust in this space is vital for HCI and the growing area of Digital Civics which works to improve or create new modes of citizen participation. Currently, however, trust is understudied from the perspectives of public officials. This gap creates a critical blind spot as technical interventions may be mismatched to the ways trust is put into action by public officials working to support citizen participation. We begin to address this gap by presenting a broad qualitative study of how public officials in a large US city operationalize trust in citizen participation. We found trust is enacted through ongoing practices that man-age distance in relationships between public officials and city residents.