Designing Participatory Processes

Cooperation emerges in various forms in the context of eGovernment. 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. 1 Motivation and methodical background For several years our group ‘Knowledge and Communication’1, has accomplished and analyzed a range of participatory planning and decision processes. All discourses, as we call these goal-oriented communication processes, are moderated and supported by internet-based collaboration and communication software. During our 1 The Knowledge and Communication team was formerly known as the Mediation Systems team of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS). Website: www.ais.fraunhofer.de/MS experimental and real-world applications we gain experience in the development of process plans. On the one hand we investigate participatory processes in a laboratory environment through experiments on specific tasks, similar to real-world tasks. The goal of the experiments is to help guide the development of IT-support for cooperation through a process-oriented, evolutionary, iterative and participative process (Floyd & Züllighoven, 1997). This approach is facilitated by the construction of future usage scenarios (Carrol, 1995), (Anker, 2002). Scenario design incorporates procedural change in the former unsupported procedural routine. The experimental setting is chosen to guarantee control over the variable factors of (computer) mediated participation processes and to maximize the learning effect from the experiments through detailed documentation. The experiments are set up as role playing exercises in a laboratory environment. They are described in some of our publications (Voss et al., 2003a), (Roeder & Voss, 2002; Voss et al., 2003b), (Roeder & Jankowski, 2003), (Voss et al., 2002). On the other hand we support real-world processes in cooperation with municipalities. Several pilot projects had shown the need for moderated online discourse in the area of participatory decision making including citizens into the municipal decision making process. We accompany the process from the outline of the plan to the final evaluation, and broaden our experience in dealing with diverse problem classes and task types. We accompanied for example visioning processes, spatial development and planning processes as well as public budget participation processes. Some of our recent publications describe the processes (Märker et al., 2002a), (Märker et al., 2002b), (Märker et al., 2003). In the early stages of our research, we focused on process plans and models and outlined process phases according to the standard phases of decision making and mediation. Later, we went into the details of the phases and focused on organizing the discourse process between the concerned stakeholders. We deciphered several levels to a process process, phase and step. Participatory discourse processes show certain schemes. They are usually divisible into several phases, depending on the task, each showing several steps of action. In supporting participatory decision making processes it is hardly possible to stick exactly with a plan in light of dynamically changing influence between task, software and process. Thus, the flexibility of the software is an important aspect, as well as the fact that a moderator (a neutral third party) is needed to restructure the process and configure the system dynamically, and take much of the burden of meta-discussion about the process from the participants. Albeit difficult because of the interacting factors, it is possible and necessary to plan the process in advance. A long history in the field of group facilitation provided us with on-site process knowledge on group communication situations. This knowledge can be used for planning the overall structure of the process. In the following, best practices are listed, which we use as a guideline to plan ITsupported participative processes. The paper may serve as a checklist for process designers. 2 Process preparation Task types: First of all, the type of the task has to be identified. Several types of tasks may be solved in a participatory way. For example site-selection or the selection of site combinations, as well as the distribution of facilities or of monetary resources are topics to be solved by a group of concerned parties. The insight about the true character of a process is valuable, but often difficult to gain in the beginning. Each type of task requires its own plan. Degree of cooperation: The task may be to cooperatively solve the problem at hand. Also, it could be possible that only parts of the task need input of the stakeholders or that the process should be participatory only in a consultative or informative way. A project (or a phase in a project) may roughly be qualified as being closed, informative, consultative or cooperative. Different groups of participants may be involved in different ways. The grade of participation is chosen on the level of the phases. Stakeholders: Stakeholders are for example representatives of municipal departments, citizens, enterprises, etc. The respective process designers, mostly the moderators but also representatives of enterprises, municipal departments, stakeholder groups or consultants are responsible for planning the participatory process and for inviting all stakeholders. If it occurs during the process, that another party is identified as a concerned stakeholder, the moderator is responsible for including them as well. Resources: The time frame and monetary resources are general conditions with impact on the process structure. Mostly, they are given and can not be negotiated. They have to be considered as hard constraints during the planning and design of the process.