1. UrbanWiki
    1. Project Members
    2. Description
    3. Investigations
    4. People to follow up with
      1. UW faculty
      2. Seattle officials
    5. Other Areas
    6. Links
      1. Prototype

UrbanWiki

(UrbanWikiTOC)

An online platform to foster citizen, NGO, business, and government interaction in the urban development planning process, with particular focus on coalition support and integration with simulation results.

Project Members

  • Natascha Karlova
  • Travis Kriplean
  • Alice Neels
  • Braden Pellett

Description

We will investigate the creation of an online platform to foster citizen engagement in the urban development planning process, in particular as a virtual community surrounding the Decision Commons. This platform could serve as a tool in the Decision Commons' toolkit. The goal for the platform is to support an online community that can explore the space of development proposals for a local urban space. Our starting point for thinking about this platform and community is to consider the wiki model, in particular MediaWiki and the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia has an interesting model of participation that might help the comparative development of UrbanWiki. However, there are sufficient differences in the conditions of the production of decisions in each domain (encyclopedia authoring and urban planning decisions) that the resulting design will be significantly different. From there, we have in mind several aspects of the platform that are absent from such incarnations of wikis but would be important to a citizen-comprised urban planning community. For one, to ground discussion of proposals in verifiable statements, we could support the embedding of UrbanSim indicators into the platform, so that simulation results could become part of users' vocabulary as they express their views. Also, to allow for the delay of a final consensus until after all viewpoints have had a chance to be developed and stabilized, the platform could support coalition building, proposal forking, consensus building, and proposal merging. Finally, to allow participants to understand the current state of the community as a whole, we could have tools for exploring the community from higher level perspectives, e.g. social network visualizations. Through our investigation, we hope to learn about the unique needs of a citizen-comprised urban planning community, and how the above and other functionality can meet those needs. At this stage, we assume that a set of concrete political issues are already on the table: we are not thinking about how to support the collaborative and participatory production of urban planning issues.

Investigations

Our strategy is to first focus on a technical investigation to produce a prototype wiki. The wiki content will draw from existing UrbanSim projects (such as perspectives, indicators), but also demonstrate first attempts at coalition support and position statements. Prototype authoring will help us understand the space better and give us a concrete tool that we can use to converse later with other groups in our conceptual and empirical investigations. Our empirical investigations will largely be conversations with different groups that may impact our design coupled with content analysis of existing online forums where political discussions take place. In parallel, we will be conducting our conceptual investigations, building from prior conceptual investigations for UrbanSim. There is a large body of work in other disciplines that bear upon our design. As this is a very large span of literature, our strategy will likely be to once again use our prototype as a conversational tool and approach faculty in these different fields to identify the most relevant subject material. By the end of the quarter, we wish to have a working prototype that has been iterated upon based on our conceptual and empirical investigations.

People to follow up with

(Please add notes if you do!)

UW faculty

Seattle officials

  • Norm Rice. Former mayor of Seattle. Paul mentioned we should talk to him.

Other Areas

We've written some rawer ideas up in other locations. They can be found at:

Prototype

A MediaWiki? prototype can be found here.