Planning with Citizens: Implementation of an e-Planning Platform and Analysis of Research Needs

Citizen participation should be an essential part of an urban planning process if the needs of the local population are to be addressed. Citizen participation should also improve acceptance of private construction projects by residents that live in or near such development. A complementary form of citizen participation to public planning meetings is to permit citizen engagement via Web 2.0 technologies, which also has the potential to get citizens involved that are usually difficult to reach. We aim to build a social, i.e. participatory, planning platform that allows technology savvy citizens to inform themselves of future and ongoing development projects and to also discuss them online. In this work we discuss the functional needs and context-of-use constraints of such an e-planning platform. A conceptual model of the technical architecture is outlined and a prototype implementation is presented. This prototype is built on free and open source software components, including a social network, to enable platform adoption in other locations. Finally, we discuss the research needs that are to be addressed if the development of participatory e-planning platforms should advance

FOSS4G 2014 Full Conference Proceedings (papers)

This Conference Proceedings is a collection of outstanding papers and posters submitted to the Academic Program of the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), 08th to 13th September 2014 in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A

CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS IMPROVING TRANSPARENCY, OPENNESS AND EFFICIENCY OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA

A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend.A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend

Analysis and automation of remedies for community hardships of non-native community

Abstract. Equality among all human beings, as a world community surpassing all the barriers such as religion, language, ethnicity, geographical location, and nationality is an important aspect all over the world. The equality for non-native communities of the country is a more important aspect of human equality. The hardships faced by the non-native community of society due to lack of equality cause irreversible damage to humankind and society. Lately, with the development of many technologies and new implementations, the fact that these technologies can assist in solving social problems came into discussion. Considering the hardships faced by non-native communities in terms of a social problem we explore how technology can assist in solving social matters. Thereby we explore a novel vision for the part that technology can contribute in solving civic matters encompassing frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking. In this thesis, we do a study on background work on how we can solve civic matters by assisting public participation frameworks, crowdsourcing frameworks, and design thinking frameworks. For this purpose, we presented three hardship stories that the non-native community of Finnish university faces which have been collected through a previous study, to collect ideas, and thoughts on how to mitigate the situation. We employed three questionnaires designed based on three conditions the conditions were First one is the baseline where the answers to the questionnaires will not be analyzed anywhere, and the second questionnaire condition is that the ideas will be used in social media and the third is that the ideas will be subjected to a quality analysis by crowd workers. To this end, we have collected ideas from 40 participants for each questionnaire with the aid of a prolific crowd-sourcing platform. Each of the questionnaires included a Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) questionnaire section to measure empathy. Further, we Analyse the data that we have collected, through a QCAE analysis, word count, and answer length analysis, analyzing the co-relations between them, doing thematic coding, and doing a tone analysis. Moreover, we implemented an automated pipeline to do tone analysis starting from fetching answers from google forms to output the tone analysis results. Ultimately, the thesis contributes to Collecting ideas on how to mitigate the hardship experiences faced by non-native communities in a Finnish university. Further enhances the awareness of the hardships faced by the non-native community of a society. And through the analysis of the results we identified different co-relations between different factors like word count and Empathy. Analyze the tone of the participants in civic issues. Finally discussed the part that technology can contribute in solving civic matters encompassing frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing and design thinking