Developing a GIS-integrated Tool to Obtain Citizens’ Input in On-site Participation—Learnings from Participatory Urban Planning of a Large City

Informal participation procedures are used by authorities to obtain citizen input and to ease formal plan approval procedures and decision-making at an early stage of urban planning projects. Participation in spatial planning is no longer conceivable without geo-referenced contributions. Hence, digital tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) and multi-touch tables (MTT) are increasingly being used to complement traditional tools. These technologies offer advantages such as visual presentations based on spatial and planning data that can help to simplify and illustrate complex issues. However, the integration of GIS and MTT in on-site participation is challenging, since media disruptions and missing tool capabilities impede the collection of citizens’ input and subsequent processing. We address these challenges by eliciting requirements and prototypically developing a GIS-integrated tool that enables citizens to comment via GIS and MTT in a context-related and intuitive way using mobile devices at participatory planning events

Citizen E-Participation: Bringing the “E” to Facilitated Workshops

Citizen participation initiatives enable public decision-makers to integrate the knowledge and preferences of citizens into municipal planning processes at an early stage. To this end, workshops are frequently and recurrently utilized instruments, which foster the collaboration of citizens with public authorities and with one another. With the rise of ICT, e-participation has evolved as a strategic pillar in digital governance, but has not fully reached participation workshops yet. Establishing an integrated e-participation approach that combines traditional and e-participation instruments poses a challenge in practice. Therefore, we apply Collaboration Engineering to design and evaluate an e-participation workshop process, which incorporates theoretical and practical requirements, allows the seamless transfer of digitally generated input across instruments and process steps, and sustains a workshop execution by domain-specific practitioners. Evaluation results suggest promising potentials of the developed process design for increased idea elaboration and more effective documentation of workshop-based participation

THE FACILITATOR IS A BOT: TOWARDS A CONVERSATIONAL AGENT FOR FACILITATING IDEA ELABORATION ON IDEA PLATFORMS

Idea platforms have become a well-established means for organizations for gaining valuable ideas from a diverse set of stakeholders such as customers, partners, or citizens. One major challenge in this field is how to make use of the full potential of those ideas. Hurdles towards this aim include a lack of necessary information in the idea descriptions to comprehend and effectively process them, redundancies among individual ideas and an exceedingly large pool of ideas, that make it difficult for decision makers to identify high-potential ideas. We address these challenges in the idea elaboration stage to lay the foundation for choosing the best ideas easier for further processing or evaluation by others. We choose a conversation based approach to challenge the initial idea contribution by a single contributor through structured facilitation by a non-human facilitator in the form of a conversational agent (CA). By instantiating the concept for a chat based CA in a Wizard of Oz study, we found exploratory indication that automated facilitation through a CA has the potential to be a feasible approximation to human facilitation in situations where the latter is not possible or where social control by a human facilitator might impede creativity or opennes

Workshop-based E-participation: Guidelines and Requirements for Informed Design

Citizens’ participation in the government decision-making process is a possibility for public administrations to enhance the quality of respective decisions and to gain support for their implementation. In order to establish a reference for developing effective public participation processes, evidence-based design guidelines are defined in literature. In the light of different policy choices and levels of participation, it is necessary to immerse in the design of specific participation formats. In this work, we develop guidelines for workshop-based e-participation modes based on a comprehensive literature review. Within the scope of the Design Science Research paradigm, this article emphasizes on the contribution to science and practice by means of elaborating design guidelines and specific requirements for designing effective solutions. Our findings extend existing design guidelines for public participation, focusing on e-participation. In essence, this work provides an accessible framework of design guidelines and inherent ICT requirements for establishing effective workshop-based e-participation processes