Supporting public participation through interactive

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsCitizen participation as a key priority of open cities, gives citizens the chance to influence public decision-making. Effectively engaging broader types of citizens into high participation levels has long been an issue due to various situational and technical constrains. Traditional public participation technologies (e.g. public hearing) usually are blame for low accessibility by the general public. The development of Information Communication Technology brings new methods to engage a broader spectrum of citizens in deeper participation level during urban planning processes. Interactive public displays as a public communication medium, hold some key advantages in comparison to other media. Compared to personal devices, public displays make public spaces into sociable places, where social communication and interaction can be enriched without intentionally or unintentionally excluding some groups’ opinions. Public displays can increase the visibility of public events while it is more flexible and up-to-date regarding showing information. Besides, they can also foster a collective awareness and support group behavioral changes. Moreover, due to the public nature of public displays, they provide broad accessibility to different groups of citizens. Public displays have a great potential in bringing new opportunities to facilitate public participation in an urban planning process. In the light of previous work on public displays, the research goal is to investigate a relatively new form of citizen participation known as Public Display Participation. This participation form refers to the use of public displays for citizen participation in the context of urban planning. The main research question of the thesis is how public displays can be used for facilitating citizen consultation in an urban planning process. First, a systematic literature review is done to get an understanding of the current achievements and gaps of research on public displays for public participation. Second, an elicitation study has been conducted to design end user centered interactions with public displays for citizens’ consulting activities. Finally, we run a usability to evaluate the usability of public displays for citizen consultation and their user experience. The main contributions of this thesis can be summarized as: (1) the identification of key challenges and opportunities for future research in using public displays for public participation in urban contexts; (2) two sets of user-defined gestures for two sets of user-defined phone gestures and hand gestures for performing eleven consulting activities, which are about examining the urban planning designs and giving feedback related to design alternatives, are also identified. (3) a new approach for using public displays for voting and commenting in urban planning, and a multi-level evaluation of a prototypical system implementing the proposed approach. Designers and researchers can use the contributions of this thesis, to create interactive public displays for supporting higher public participat i.e. citizen collaboration and empowerment

Social Media Roadmaps. Exploring the futures triggered by social media.

Social media refers to a combination of three elements: content, user communities and Web 2.0 technologies. This foresight report presents six roadmaps of the anticipated developments of social media in three themes: society, companies, and local environment. One of the roadmaps, the meta-roadmap, is the synthesis of them all. The society sub-roadmap explores societal participation through communities. There are three sub-roadmaps relating to companies: interacting with companies through communities, social media in work environment, and social media enhanced shopping. The local environment sub-roadmap looks at social media in local environment. The roadmapping process was carried out through two workshops at VTT. The results of the report are crystallized into five main development lines triggered by social media. First development line is transparency referring to its increasing role in society, both with positive and negative consequences. The second development line is the rise of ubiquitous participatory communication model. This refers to an increase of two-directional and community-based interactivity in every field, where it has some added value. The third development is reflexive empowerment. This refers to the role of social media as an enabler of grass-root community collaboration. The fourth development line is the duality personalization/fragmentation vs. mass effects/integration. Personalization /fragmentation emphasises the tailoring of the web services and content. This development is counterweighted by mass effects/integration, like the formation of super-nodes in the web. The fifth development line is the new relations of physical and virtual worlds. This development line highlights the idea that practices induced by social media, e.g. communication, participation, co-creation, feedback and rating, will get more common in daily environment, and that virtual and physical worlds will be more and more interlinked.</p

Proposition d'un modèle de processus pour les affichages publics adaptatifs supportant la participation citoyenne

National audienceIn recent years, public displays have been studied as a way to foster citizen participation. However, their surroundings and users are prone to high variability, which makes it tedious to accommodate different contexts with an optimal participation experience. In this paper, we propose adaptive public displays as a lead for solution in tackling this issue. From a review of the motivators and barriers affecting citizen's interaction with public displays we defined a process model destined to serve as a guide for designers of such systems.Au cours des dernières années, les affichages publics ont été étudiés comme moyen d'encourager la participation citoyenne. Cependant, leur environnement et leurs utilisateurs sont sujets à une grande variabilité, ce qui rend fastidieuse l'adaptation à différents contextes en conservant une expérience de participation optimale. Dans cet article, nous proposons les affichages publics adaptatifs comme piste de solution à ce problème. A partir d'une revue des motivations et des barrières qui affectent l'interaction des citoyens avec les affichages publics, nous avons défini un modèle de processus destiné à servir de guide aux concepteurs de tels systèmes

Sustainable forest management using decision theaters : rethinking participatory planning

Involving stakeholders in the decision-making process can be very complex and time consuming. Decision theater (DT), which enables the combination of visualization and decision modeling capabilities together with human capacity of insight and interaction, is proposed for addressing this challenging problem in the forest sector. A generic framework for designing DTs to support participatory planning in the forest sector is proposed. To enable DT implementation and support decision-making in the DT in the province of Québec, Canada, the conceptual design of a decision-support system called Forest Community-DSS (FC-DSS) has been developed. Implementing FC-DSS along with other technologies in a DT environment can contribute to engage the stakeholders in the decision-making process by increasing participation frequency, collecting more inputs from the stakeholders, supporting the development and evaluation of alternative options and the selection of preferred alternatives. A DT-based collaboration approach would contribute to address the multiple issues of the stakeholders involved in participatory planning in Québec. Other Canadian provinces and other countries facing similar issues can benefit from the proposed approach

Essential Collaborative Technology Tools for the 21st Century: FMCS TAGS System

Mediators employed by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service ( FMCS ) utilize a powerful set of technology tools that helps groups more effectively solve problems, make decisions and implement those decisions more successfully. FMCS mediators use these tools to help customers conduct collective bargaining negotiations, strategic planning sessions, grievance meetings, internal elections, large conferences, as well as remote meetings and online surveys via the Internet. Known as the FMCS TAGS System, this network of Internet servers, mobile computers, electronic conferencing facilities, customized software and external partners has demonstrated significant achievements during its first two years of operation. FMCS customers report that TAGS helps them better prepare for meetings and negotiations, retain better records, communicate better with constituents, minimize the impact of geographic separation and save time, travel and money. FMCS mediators integrate TAGS technology tools with their traditional skill set to help participants engage more openly and honestly, share knowledge and opinions more constructively, generate better ideas and build a stronger commitment to joint action. As a result, TAGS technology tools help FMCS customers conduct shorter, more productive, problem-focused meetings and help minimize transaction costs associated with group decision-making. This article describes the reasons that FMCS invests in technology tools, identifies the hardware and software solutions adopted by FMCS, postulates why those solutions have been successfully applied by FMCS mediators and explores several factors that any group should consider before using such leading edge tools

Desktop multimedia environments to support collaborative distance learning

Desktop multimedia conferencing, when two or more persons can communicate among themselves via personal computers with the opportunity to see and hear one another as well as communicate via text messages while working with commonly available stored resources, appears to have important applications to the support of collaborative learning. In this paper we explore this potential in three ways: (a) through an analysis of particular learner needs when learning and working collaboratively with others outside of face-to-face situations; (b) through an analysis of different forms of conferencing environments, including desktop multimedia environments, relative to their effectiveness in terms of meeting learner needs for distributed collaboration; and (c) through reporting the results of a formative evaluation of a prototype desktop multimedia conferencing system developed especially for the support of collaborative learning. Via these analyses, suggestions are offered relating to the functionalities of desktop multimedia conferencing systems for the support of collaborative learning, reflecting new developments in both the technologies available for such systems and in our awareness of learner needs when working collaboratively with one other outside of face-to-face situations