Towards a two-way participatory process

Abstract

In less than a decade, several millions of articles have been written in Wikipedia and several million roads have been traced out on Open Street Map (OSM). In the meantime, the authorities have still not been able to understand and use the power of crowd sourcing. In this paper, we present the design principles of a new Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS). We aim to eliminate the typical limitations of previous unsuccessful platforms, that have mostly failed due to conceptual design issues. We argue that two fundamental changes must exist in new PPGIS platforms: there is a shift from hierarchies to increased equal rights platforms; improved communication, more transparency, and bi-directionality. The role of the authority in former platforms was really an authoritarian role: having all the power and only partly knowing and controlling the entire platform. This is completely different from the crowd source platforms we know to be successful. So, one fundamental change is to diminish hierarchies and prevent people from hiding themselves behind the institution. The second major conceptual design issue is related to transparency and communication. While former platforms use mechanisms to prevent citizens from seeing each other's participation, we aim to enable people to see the participation of others. That's a fundamental feature in social networks. We will also design it to be a two-way communication platform. If citizens are requested to participate, the administration must use the same platform to communicate with them. Not only to provide feedback, but also to publish useful information for the citizen. In this paper we describe how social media meets our design principles. We decide to implement our case study, the "Fix my Street" application, on top of a social engine, to take advantage of all social media features. Two necessary extensions to the social engine are briefly described, to capture the core logic of our application. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.