Participation in Urban Interaction Design for Civic Engagement

The future of civic engagement is characterised by both technological innovation as well as new technological user practices that are fuelled by trends towards mobile, personal devices; broadband connectivity; open data; urban interfaces; and cloud computing. These technology trends are progressing at a rapid pace, and have led global technology vendors to package and sell the “Smart City” as a centralised service delivery platform predicted to optimise and enhance cities’ key performance indicators – and generate a profitable market. The top-down deployment of these large and proprietary technology platforms have helped sectors such as energy, transport, and healthcare to increase efficiencies. However, an increasing number of scholars and commentators warn of another “IT bubble” emerging. Along with some city leaders, they argue that the top-down approach does not fit the governance dynamics and values of a liberal democracy when applied across sectors. A thorough understanding is required, of the socio-cultural nuances of how people work, live, play across different environments, and how they employ social media and mobile devices to interact with, engage in, and constitute public realms. Although the term “slacktivism” is sometimes used to denote a watered down version of civic engagement and activism that is reduced to clicking a “Like” button and signing online petitions, we believe that we are far from witnessing another Biedermeier period that saw people focus on the domestic and the non-political. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the Occupy movements in New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Arab Spring, Stuttgart 21, Fukushima, the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the Vinegar Movement in Brazil in 2013. These examples of civic action shape the dynamics of governments, and in turn, call for new processes to be incorporated into governance structures. Participatory research into these new processes across the triad of people, place and technology is a significant and timely investment to foster productive, sustainable, and liveable human habitats. With this article, we want to reframe the current debates in academia and priorities in industry and government to allow citizens and civic actors to take their rightful centrepiece place in civic movements. This calls for new participatory approaches for co-inquiry and co-design. It is an evolving process with an explicit agenda to facilitate change, and we propose participatory action research (PAR) as an indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance infrastructures and practices for civic engagement. We do not limit our definition of civic technologies to tools specifically designed to simply enhance government and governance, such as renewing your car registration online or casting your vote electronically on election day. Rather, we are interested in civic media and technologies that foster citizen engagement in the widest sense, and particularly the participatory design of such civic technologies that strive to involve citizens in political debate and action as well as question conventional approaches to political issues. The rationale for this approach is an alternative to smart cities in a “perpetual tomorrow,” based on many weak and strong signals of civic actions revolving around technology seen today. It seeks to emphasise and direct attention to active citizenry over passive consumerism, human actors over human factors, culture over infrastructure, and prosperity over efficiency. First, we will have a look at some fundamental issues arising from applying simplistic smart city visions to the kind of a problem a city poses. We focus on the touch points between “the city” and its civic body, the citizens. In order to provide for meaningful civic engagement, the city must provide appropriate interfaces.

Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.

Gov 2.0: Towards a User Generated State?

New elements associated withWeb 2.0 relating to interactivity and end-user focus have combined with the availability of newlevels of information to encourage the development of what may be termed a Gov 2.0 approach.This, in combination with recent initiatives in the modernising government programme, has emphasised new levels of public participation and engagement with government as well as a re-engineering of public services tomake them more responsive to their end users. Adopting a governmentality perspective, it is argued that this involves a wider process of governing through constructing and reconstructing ideas of the public, community and individual citizen-consumers who take on a role in their own governance. It is argued that this fundamental re-working of the nature of what is public represents a constitutional change that is perhaps more signi¢cant than the constitutional reform programme directed to formal government which attracts more attention

Bioethics’ Lack in Relation to Person-Centred User-Driven Health Systems Planning: A Call for Change

La tribune de l'éditeur / Editor's Soapbox

User Experience (a hidden barrier) in OER

More Open Education Resources (OER) and learning environments are being created and starting to mature and there are a number of barriers to learning and creator participation. One often overlooked barrier that has been given less attention, especially within OERs, is user experience (UX). UX is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. We are creatures with emotional needs and, in the rush to get great content open and available sometimes the usability, the wow factor and good design principles get left by the wayside. I will demonstrate ways to think about UX for your OER and learning environments and why this is an important factor in helping engage learners with our educational materials. ‘The real payoff comes when we can make that remarkability last. When we can make people continually feel our work is worthy of discussion. When—for weeks, months, maybe even years— the people who engage with our work continue to sing its praises to everybody they meet’– (Jared Spool in Walter, A. Designing for Emotion). Walter, A. (2011) Designing for Emotion, A Book Apart. http://www.abookapart.com/products/designing-for-emotion

Upgrading a TCABR data analysis and acquisition system for remote participation using Java, XML, RCP and modern client/server communication/authentication

The TCABR data analysis and acquisition system has been upgraded to support a joint research programme using remote participation technologies. The architecture of the new system uses Java language as programming environment. Since application parameters and hardware in a joint experiment are complex with a large variability of components, requirements and specification solutions need to be flexible and modular, independent from operating system and computer architecture. To describe and organize the information on all the components and the connections among them, systems are developed using the extensible Markup Language (XML) technology. The communication between clients and servers uses remote procedure call (RPC) based on the XML (RPC-XML technology). The integration among Java language, XML and RPC-XML technologies allows to develop easily a standard data and communication access layer between users and laboratories using common software libraries and Web application. The libraries allow data retrieval using the same methods for all user laboratories in the joint collaboration, and the Web application allows a simple graphical user interface (GUI) access. The TCABR tokamak team in collaboration with the IPFN (Instituto de Plasmas e Fusao Nuclear, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa) is implementing this remote participation technologies. The first version was tested at the Joint Experiment on TCABR (TCABRJE), a Host Laboratory Experiment, organized in cooperation with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) in the framework of the IAEA Coordinated Research Project (CRP) on ""Joint Research Using Small Tokamaks"". (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Shared decision-making in mental health care : a user perspective on decisional needs in community-based services

BACKGROUND: Shared decision-making (SDM) is an emergent research topic in the field of mental health care and is considered to be a central component of a recovery-oriented system. Despite the evidence suggesting the benefits of this change in the power relationship between users and practitioners, the method has not been widely implemented in clinical practice. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to investigate decisional and information needs among users with mental illness as a prerequisite for the development of a decision support tool aimed at supporting SDM in community-based mental health services in Sweden. METHODS: Three semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with 22 adult users with mental illness. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using a directed content analysis. This method was used to develop an in-depth understanding of the decisional process as well as to validate and conceptually extend Elwyn et al.'s model of SDM. RESULTS: The model Elwyn et al. have created for SDM in somatic care fits well for mental health services, both in terms of process and content. However, the results also suggest an extension of the model because decisions related to mental illness are often complex and involve a number of life domains. Issues related to social context and individual recovery point to the need for a preparation phase focused on establishing cooperation and mutual understanding as well as a clear follow-up phase that allows for feedback and adjustments to the decision-making process. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: The current study contributes to a deeper understanding of decisional and information needs among users of community-based mental health services that may reduce barriers to participation in decision-making. The results also shed light on attitudinal, relationship-based, and cognitive factors that are important to consider in adapting SDM in the mental health system.

User Manual for the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Assessment of soil erosion and soil conservation practices in Angereb watershed, Ethiopia: Technological and land user context

Soil conservation technologies that fit well to local scale and are acceptable to land users are increasingly needed. To achieve this at small-holder farm level, there is a need for an understanding of specific erosion processes and indicators, the land users’ knowledge and their willingness, ability and possibilities to respond to the respective problems to decide on control options. This study was carried out to assess local erosion and performance of earlier introduced conservation terraces from both technological and land users’ points of view. The study was conducted during July to August 2008 at Angereb watershed on 58 farm plots from three selected case-study catchments. Participatory erosion assessment and evaluation were implemented along with direct field measurement procedures. Our focus was to involve the land users in the action research to explore with them the effectiveness of existing conservation measures against the erosion hazard. Terrace characteristics measured and evaluated against the terrace implementation guideline of Hurni (1986). The long-term consequences of seasonal erosion indicators had often not been known and noticed by farmers. The cause and effect relationships of the erosion indicators and conservation measures have shown the limitations and gaps to be addressed towards sustainable erosion control strategies. Less effective erosion control has been observed and participants have believed the gaps are to be the result of lack of landusers’ genuine participation. The results of both local erosion observation and assessment of conservation efficacy using different aspects show the need to promote approaches for erosion evaluation and planning of interventions by the farmers themselves. This paper describes the importance of human factor involving in the empirical erosion assessment methods towards sustainable soil conservation.

Analyzing Query Success and User Context

This paper describes the participation of DAEDALUS at the LogCLEF lab in CLEF 2011. This year, the objectives of our participation are twofold. The first topic is to analyze if there is any measurable effect on the success of the search queries if the native language and the interface language chosen by the user are different. The idea is to determine if this difference may condition the way in which the user interacts with the search application. The second topic is to analyze the user context and his/her interaction with the system in the case of successful queries, to discover out any relation among the user native language, the language of the resource involved and the interaction strategy adopted by the user to find out such resource. Only 6.89% of queries are successful out of the 628,607 queries in the 320,001 sessions with at least one search query in the log. The main conclusion that can be drawn is that, in general for all languages, whether the native language matches the interface language or not does not seem to affect the success rate of the search queries. On the other hand, the analysis of the strategy adopted by users when looking for a particular resource shows that people tend to use the simple search tool, frequently first running short queries build up of just one specific term and then browsing through the results to locate the expected resource

Design of an Advanced Platform for Citizen Participation Committed to Ensuring Freedom of Speech

This paper presents a proposal for an advanced system of debate in an environment of digital democracy which overcomes the limitations of existing systems. We have been especially careful in applying security procedures in telematic systems, for they are to offer citizens the guarantees that society demands. New functional tools have been included to ensure user authentication and to permit anonymous participation where the system is unable to disclose or even to know the identity of system users. The platform prevents participation by non-entitled persons who do not belong to the authorized group from giving their opinion. Furthermore, this proposal allows for verifying the proper function of the system, free of tampering or fraud intended to alter the conclusions or outcomes of participation. All these tools guarantee important aspects of both a social and technical nature, most importantly: freedom of expression, equality and auditability.

Model pedestrian safety program user's guide supplement. Final report.

Federal Highway Administration, McLean, Va.

Model pedestrian safety program user's guide.

Federal Highway Administration, McLean, Va.

The snakes and ladders of user involvement:moving beyond Arnstein

For 35 years, Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation has been a touchstone for policy makers and practitioners promoting user involvement. This article critically assesses Arnstein's writing in relation to user involvement in health drawing on evidence from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and Canada. Arnstein's model, however, by solely emphasizing power, limits effective responses to the challenge of involving users in services and undermines the potential of the user involvement process. Such an emphasis on power assumes that it has a common basis for users, providers and policymakers and ignores the existence of different relevant forms of knowledge and expertise. It also fails to recognise that for some users, participation itself may be a goal. We propose a new model to replace the static image of a ladder and argue that for user involvement to improve health services it must acknowledge the value of the process and the diversity of knowledge and experience of both health professionals and lay people.

User involvement in UK cancer services:bridging the policy gap

Recent UK government initiatives aim to increase user involvement in the National Health Service (NHS) in two ways: by encouraging service users to take an active role in making decisions about their own care; and by establishing opportunities for wider public participation in service development. The purpose of this study was to examine how UK cancer service users understand and relate to the concept of user involvement. The data were collected through in-depth interviews, which were analysed for content according to the principles of grounded theory. The results highlight the role of information and communication in effective user involvement. Perhaps more importantly, this study suggests that the concept of user involvement is unclear to many cancer service users. This paper argues the need for increased awareness and understanding of what user involvement is and how it can work.