Designing effective public participation

This paper reviews the various connections that can exist between the design of participatory processes and the different kind of results that they can entail. It details how effective participatory processes can be designed, whatever are the results that participation is deemed to elicit. It shows the main trends pertaining to design choicesand considers how to classify different arrangements in order to choose from among them. Then the paper deals with the main dilemmas that tend to arise when designing participatory processes. Thanks to this review, the paper argues that participatory processes tend to display a certain degree of ambivalence that cannot be completely overcome through the design choices

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public's use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a 'conversation' with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms. Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how 'civic tech' platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services

Considering planned change anew: stretching large group interventions strategically, emotionally and meaningfully

Large Group Interventions, methods for involving “the whole system” in a change process, are important contemporary planned organizational change approaches. They are well known to practitioners but unfamiliar to many organizational researchers, despite the fact that these interventions address crucial issues about which many organizational researchers are concerned. On the other hand, these interventions do not appear to be informed by contemporary developments in organizational theorizing. This disconnect on both sides is problematic. We describe such interventions and their importance; illustrate them with extended descriptions of particular Future Search and Whole‐Scale™ change interventions; summarize research on strategy, emotion, and sensemaking that may inform them; and suggest questions about the interventions that may stimulate research and reflection on practice. We also discuss conditions that may foster effective engagement between Large Group Interventions practitioners and organizational researchers. Our approach represents a way to conduct a review that combines scholarly literature and skilled practice and to initiate a dialog between them

Neo-planning: Location-based social media to engage Australia's new digital locals

Community engagement with time poor and seemingly apathetic citizens continues to challenge local governments. Capturing the attention of a digitally literate community who are technology and socially savvy adds a new quality to this challenge. Community engagement is resource and time intensive, yet local governments have to manage on continually tightened budgets. The benefits of assisting citizens in taking ownership in making their community and city a better place to live in collaboration with planners and local governments are well established. This study investigates a new collaborative form of civic participation and engagement for urban planning that employs in-place digital augmentation. It enhances people’s experience of physical spaces with digital technologies that are directly accessible within that space, in particular through interaction with mobile phones and public displays. The study developed and deployed a system called Discussions in Space (DIS) in conjunction with a major urban planning project in Brisbane. Planners used the system to ask local residents planning-related questions via a public screen, and passers-by sent responses via SMS or Twitter onto the screen for others to read and reflect, hence encouraging in-situ, real-time, civic discourse. The low barrier of entry proved to be successful in engaging a wide range of residents who are generally not heard due to their lack of time or interest. The system also reflected positively on the local government for reaching out in this way. Challenges and implications of the short-texted and ephemeral nature of this medium were evaluated in two focus groups with urban planners. The paper concludes with an analysis of the planners’ feedback evaluating the merits of the data generated by the system to better engage with Australia’s new digital locals