Jul@ - A web app to support the political participation of adolescents and young adults in rural areas

This paper presents the concept, a prototype and the initial test of a web app that supports the political participation of young people in rural areas in ermany. Rural adolescents and young adults are often not adequately represented in the political dialogue. With the proposed web app, the authors want to address this issue and create new forms of participation. Within this paper, the requirements engineering and design process in cooperation with the target group is described. Based upon the users’ input from requirements engineering workshops and a design thinking workshop, a user interface of the planned application was designed and optimized. Subsequently, a first version of the web app was developed and tested in an event with young people. Our research shows that requirements of young people in rural areas for the app deviate from those of professional youth care organizations, thus creating challenges for the rollout of the proposed application.