Citizen E-Participation: Bringing the “E” to Facilitated Workshops

Abstract

Citizen participation initiatives enable public decision-makers to integrate the knowledge and preferences of citizens into municipal planning processes at an early stage. To this end, workshops are frequently and recurrently utilized instruments, which foster the collaboration of citizens with public authorities and with one another. With the rise of ICT, e-participation has evolved as a strategic pillar in digital governance, but has not fully reached participation workshops yet. Establishing an integrated e-participation approach that combines traditional and e-participation instruments poses a challenge in practice. Therefore, we apply Collaboration Engineering to design and evaluate an e-participation workshop process, which incorporates theoretical and practical requirements, allows the seamless transfer of digitally generated input across instruments and process steps, and sustains a workshop execution by domain-specific practitioners. Evaluation results suggest promising potentials of the developed process design for increased idea elaboration and more effective documentation of workshop-based participation.