Digital Citizen Participation – Involving Citizens Through Immersive Systems in Urban Planning

Citizen participation is a democratic practice that became, especially on a local level, an important mean for the public to be included in the development of their immediate surrounding. With the digitalization of work and social life also the digitalization of the public sector, including governmental action, began. This process, as a research discipline called digital government, includes addressing how the interaction between citizens and their state should be designed. A meaningful way to do so are digital platforms that enable participation in governmental action. Digital Citizen Participation, a concept introduced in this dissertation, tries to include recent technological innovations in e-Participation platform design. This dissertation argues that these innovations might help overcome general barriers in participation processes. When it comes to construction projects in urban environments for example, public debates and protests may arise if architectural plans remain unshared or are not sufficiently accessible for the citizens they might affect. To involve the public affected by urban planning, offering easily graspable visualizations for citizens is key. This dissertation deals with the participation of citizens in urban planning through an e-Participation platform that makes use of immersive technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality. In this work, this idea is investigated through a design science research approach that uses qualitative and quantitative methods. While the first qualitative study puts for-ward a set of meta-requirements and design principles based on interviews with 27 individuals, the second study (n=339) and third study (n=382) evaluate quantitatively a prototype based on those design principles. The used methods are adequately contex-tualized and, in the end, a final prototype of the platform is demonstrated. This allows to show findings concerning the forms and levels of participation citizens and initiators are interested in when using immersive systems for public participation, and how an ideal platform should be designed. Among many other findings, the studies show that citizens have a high interest in using immersive systems for public participation and find their qualities for visualization to be highly valuable

Crafting a tooling idea into a new domestic landscape re.visited

Crafting a tooling idea into a new domestic landscape re.visited: This document pretends to establish sensible paths that converge for a more sustainable world. In this sense the emphases is in verifying and characterize the user’s ways of life and there real needs in finding sustainable regenerative definitions. The requirement to interpret different contexts of new social and peripheral life-styles, developing adaptative crafty tools that promote forms, services, products and systems that do not compromise well being but to establish a symbiotic relation between ambient and the new and necessary technologies. Design criteria will allow an interpenetreural emphasis in this domestic living landscape, and their relations for a flexible and fluid system. The idea of one unlimited progress and unlimited growing process of product systems (classical and cycle point of view: production, consumer and economic development) has been an issue for arguing the simplicity models that today have a no more recognizable path for sustainability (Perejaume, 2000). The technological innovation and design need a new kind of dialogue between science and society as the origin of the creative process of mankind and there interdisciplinary, systemic and plural ways of thinking (Bonsiepe, 1985) .The project is a process, an attitude before being a trade (Mari, 1997) the sustainable ways of thinking needs to understand the responsibility of the designer and the role that he represents in the management system of a product industry (Papanek, 1971). The awareness of thinking in new products as open source design practice for a radical proceeding inside ecological times (Manzini, 2001). The ‘new’ scenarios, define mobility, as a main factor in household strategy by researches in series of self-packaging and do-it yourselfer modular systems that promote an itinerant portable well-being. This perspective demands a scenario where there is the possibility of including in-services into this modular products and self-assembly condition items for operative/functional regenerative potential tooling. This process has is origin into one empiric mobile research representing two parts of the same problems: adaptable living household into one semi-sphere of an incessant mobility and a research for the knowledge into one unsustainable dwelling. This issue includes the study of itinerant life-styles, especially students, teachers or other mobile users promoting sensibilities for craft or the ability for incorporate reacting tools for acting into self recognition and memory identification. The necessary interpretation of different and plural habitats put together ‘new’ forms of living objects but also their simple ephemeral edifications in their frequent migrations. This represents a total alienation with this life-cycle-products criteria’s and quality in a sustainable society, also represents a full system that needs eco-instruments to transform a low material and energy intensity. These special users are active part of the solution and their convenience in the development of the promising scenarios and their relations

Political Participation in the Digital Age: An Ethnographic Comparison Between Iceland and Germany

This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats

Political Participation in the Digital Age

This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats

Technology and democracy: the who and how in decision-making. The cases of Estonia and Catalonia

This paper focusses on the use of technology to improve democracy, comparing the cases of Estonia and Catalonia. Both examples are closely related in their use of technology to further democratize the decision-making processes, but have opposite starting points. Estonia’s internet voting system is an offshoot of the comprehensive e-governance system developed by the Estonian government. It is meant to make it more convenient for people to vote and, thus, easier for them to take part in elections. In Catalonia, the online participation system Decidim, initially set up in the city of Barcelona, represents a bottom-up project that emerged from the 15 May protests and aims to make the representa-tive democratic system more direct and participatory. In our comparison we approach both paradigmatic cases from a theoretical reflection on the ideal types of democracy in relation to how decisions are made and by whom. Both projects have evolved and integrated new features that draw them together. First, internet voting is able to reach wider portions of society and digitally transform the Public Administration. Second, online participation platforms increase the potential for collecting citizens’ proposals and enriching discussions. These features make them more like a mixed model which, in the current model of representative democracy, creates spaces for a more direct and deliberative democracy

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

SoK: The Ghost Trilemma

Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and manipulation employed in these contexts. However it has long seemed that, try as it might, the security community has been unable to stem the rising tide of such problems. We posit the Ghost Trilemma, that there are three key properties of identity -- sentience, location, and uniqueness -- that cannot be simultaneously verified in a fully-decentralized setting. Many fully-decentralized systems -- whether for communication or social coordination -- grapple with this trilemma in some way, perhaps unknowingly. We examine the design space, use cases, problems with prior approaches, and possible paths forward. We sketch a proof of this trilemma and outline options for practical, incrementally deployable schemes to achieve an acceptable tradeoff of trust in centralized trust anchors, decentralized operation, and an ability to withstand a range of attacks, while protecting user privacy.Comment: 22 pages with 1 figure and 8 table