Insights from a m-participation prototype in the wild

Abstract

Developing web-based as well as mobile platforms to encourage citizens to become involved in urban governance and political decision-making processes is becoming increasingly popular amongst municipalities and organisations. However, the vast majority of them either implement a one-way communication between citizens and governance or tends to be more of a consultation process instead of actively integrating citizens in decision-making. Our research aims to strengthen citizens' involvement in governance and encourage a continuous dialogue between municipalities and citizens. To explore the opportunities and impacts of novel mobile participation concepts, we developed a mobile application. This paper reports on two consecutive studies, which evaluate and explore user acceptance of general concepts of our system. Being still in the development phase, we focused on specific features of the prototype. Results of both studies are presented and discussed in relation to opportunities for m-participation tools. The paper concludes with an outline of future work.