PosterTalk: Expanding Participatory Agency in Public Survey Platforms via Middle-Out Gatekeeping

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Public surveys intend to integrate civic values into official decision-making. Because such surveys are typically infrastructured from the top-down, citizens' participatory agency is often reduced to reacting to concerns that may not align with their bottom-up needs. This paper presents PosterTalk, a physically situated and digitally facilitated middle-out survey platform that explicitly involved bottom-up citizens in its gatekeeping activities. Over a four months in-the-wild deployment, PosterTalk accumulated 41 inquiries and 420 responses spanning over 13 civic themes. Its emerging survey content directly influenced the local policy agenda of the facilitating neighbourhood committee, and nudged them to reassess their civic representativeness. By critically analysing the different survey content and stakeholder engagements, this paper contributes an encompassing middle-out framework to guide and benchmark participatory agency in future public survey deployments and offers four guidelines for diversifying bottom-up civic agendas, readjusting top-down representation, avoiding bottom-up misperceptions of power, and promoting top-down introspection.