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2004
Conference Paper
Title
Designing participatory processes
Abstract
Cooperation emerges in various forms in the context of eGovemment. Cooperation is practised between the members of a municipal department, between two or more departments, between the municipal representatives and other stakeholders. Sometimes the cooperation involves public participation. In each cooperation mode, expert knowledge and experience has to be collected, shared and processed, and leads eventually to the desired outcome of the cooperation - the solution of the task. The cooperating planners, decision makers and stakeholders accomplish a number of procedures everyday, for example various recurring city planning tasks, visionary participatory planning processes, decisions on how to distribute funds, site selection, voting tasks, and many more. All of those procedures can benefit from IT-support. However, it is crucial to follow certain steps in the preparation of the respective process to heighten the chance of success. There is a long way from the problem at hand to a high-quality solution, from the outline of the process plan that includes the definition of the task, naming the involved parties, determining the amount of time and resources, via the decision on the process structure and the composition of steps and methods, to the core of the communication - it's ontology and then up to the transformation of the plan into a real-world setting, the combination of media and tools, the structuring of the underlying software systems and online and onsite meetings, not to forget the importance of the moderation and the objective evaluation. The paper gives an overview on how to realize web-based participatory processes. It shows how to draw a process plan from the beginning to the end. The presented knowledge was achieved by evaluation of various experimental and real-world processes. It consists of best practice experiences and cross-disciplinary research results.