Tagging feature

[owenjoseph]

Background

Preliminary user feedback revealed that a majority of target users who had been to a council meeting only went when the council was discussing an issue they personally cared about. The inference is that a user doesn't care about every item the city is discussing at an upcoming council meeting and prefer to have issues they care about surfaced or highlighted to them in some way.

Before any issue-categorization solution can be implemented, we'd have to be able to group issues by something semantically meaningful and useful to the end users, like "policy area." However, without policy categories that are both predefined by the city and evergreen (i.e. they don't change from year-to-year), the Engage contributors have decided to leverage textual analysis to determine common "tags" that can serve as a stand-in for categories.

Why Tagging and not categorization

In order to approach any kind of categorization

This is not categorization per se. We've decided to leverage the TFiDF results for user-facing tagging.

Curating the TFiDF tags

Each issue should present 4-5 user-facing tags. We'll need to look at a selection of example issues and cull overly-broad tags (e.g. "city" or "policy" and "project").

A user can click on these tags to return all content with the same tag.

A user should also be presented with the option to offer feedback on whether they think these tags are relevant / helpful.

Incorporating City-Defined Rubrics

We'll also provide an opportunity for people to provide the city feedback on whether they feel a given issue meets the city's stated goals for the year.

Kegan shared these city-defined goals:

just a few weeks ago, Council had their yearly retreat in which they identified a new list of City Priorities:

• Affordability

• Keeping Neighborhoods Safe

• Reduce Homelessness

• Climate Change

• Engaged and Thriving Community

• Mobility and Access
  and a list of Our Values (not sure who Our is... i think it refers to the community at large):

• Accountability

• Equity

• Inclusion

• Resilience

• Safety

• Stewardship
  these lists were informed by a community-wide survey, City staff survey, and in-person community input at Council meetings and the retreat

We can include these in the optional reporting section of the feedback flow, giving the city visibility into the public perception of their efforts according to the city's own defined success rubric.

Link to category results: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D0_oPQvspy_dKF9_woPkz_tcwTgridF6BdtBbY2VR48/edit?usp=sharing