Good Participation in Web-based Public Participation Geographic Information System (WPPGIS)

• Author / Creator

  Hamayeli Mehrabani, Maral

• Development of Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) was an attempt to bring technology to communities for their decision-making. To overcome the limitations of the traditional public participation and with the huge progress in the web-based technologies, community planners added Internet to the PPGIS. Web-based Public Participation Geographic Information System (WPPGIS) is an integration of offline and online participation that is benefitted from both face-to-face interactions of the traditional participatory meetings and the open, convenient, deliberative, fast, fair, and interactive online participation.
  It is critical for every participatory decision-making project to ensure whether the pre-set objectives of the participation have been met, whether the process has been satisfactory and meeting expectations of the planners and participants, and whether the applied methods and tools resulted an effective/successful public participation. As the result, evaluation of the effectiveness and success of the participation is mandatory to a complete participatory process. However, due to the lack of available standards and manuals on how to implement a successful participation, this thesis attempts to investigate the components of a good participation in WPPGIS.
  Through extensive literature review, this study proposes a comprehensive list of potential criteria for evaluation of offline and online participation in WPPGIS. It is hoped that the list can be modified to the needs of each WPPGIS project. Furthermore, the main focus of the research is providing a practical guide for practitioners to encourage further discussions on how to consider effectiveness and success of the participation from early designing and initiating of the project. While the relevancy and validity of the many results of the reviewed researches can not be tested, the research followed a constructivist paradigm that considers truth as a relative matter. In this was, the conclusion of the study relies on the subjective interpretation of the researcher on deciding whether a certain criterion is valid.
  Due to the uncertainty on the definition of a good participation, the current research provides an opportunity for participation initiators and participants to re-frame their definition based on the listed criteria and their project-specific requirements. Furthermore, the list is a suggestion rather than a guideline and not all the components needs to be included to make a participatory decision-making a good participation. Web-based technology, digital skills, and socio-demographic characteristics of many communities has changed tremendously. While it might make several evaluation criteria non-appropriate, it has been left to the decision of the initiators of a project to adopt them based on the specific requirements of their project. In conclusion good participation should be defined for each participatory project, individually. The list would provide enough material for participatory projects to discuss on the necessities and requirements of their project to make participation good and effective.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Participation evaluation
  • Public participation
  • Effective
  • Good participation
  • Web-based PPGIS

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3JS9HQ56

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.