We-planning: participatory process to develop a digital platform for a collaborative governance of city services

Public administration, civil society organizations and private sector are strictly interconnected in re-thinking the management of city services and urban transformations toward new form of integration between top-down programmes and bottom up initiatives. The current web applications are not meant to coordinate heterogeneous stakeholders, their agendas and plans impacting over the public sphere, because usually address one specific task related to the management of the city such as issues reporting, online voting, and community services. Designing a digital platform to support the implicit and explicit continuative collaboration among city players involves the challenge to define a shared framework for all of them, representing the real context of their actions: geolocalised evolving multiple social networks, formal and informal relations protocols, roles and competences, and competing objectives to be mediated. The approach followed to model this kind of framework has been based on a participatory methodology structured in three cycles involving contextual enquiries, processes analysis, co-design activities, software development and testing in operational environments within local projects and initiatives at neighborhoods and urban level. The first cycle led to the outline of the platform intended as contents structure, interfaces, and user basic interactions. In the second cycle, urban dynamics have been defined through use patterns and functionalities in several multi-actors’ collaborative scenarios. The third cycle, currently on-going, is oriented to introduce procedural changes in communication and co-management practices refactoring local processes. Starting from the existing functioning advanced prototype, FirstLife, the future research will continue to build a collaborative planning support system enabling distributed decision making processes, the coordination of independent planning activities regarding physical transformations and social regenerations, and monitoring of the implementation of shared actions.