KMi Seminars
Capturing, Mapping and Integrating Argumentation as Project Memory in Participatory Urban Planning
This event took place on Wednesday 21 March 2007 at 12:15

 
Anna De Liddo Polytechnic of Bari, Italy

Technology is increasingly providing urban planners and designers with tools and methods to collect and communicate spatial data and assist spatial analysis, such as participatory GIS (PPGIS), urban modelling, simulation models and virtual reality. The presentation of spatial and planning data, however, is only part of the story. Who was involved in the specification of the models that generated these documents? How is the data interpreted by the different stakeholders? How can we capture and integrate diverse perspectives from different community groups, planners, and government? These are the critical questions raised by Participatory Planning Processes, which we see as one manifestation of deliberative democracy. PPP motivates requirements for new tools to support the capture, negotiation and integration of information, ideas and arguments. The knowledge derived from different and parallel processes, driven and interpreted by different actors, needs to be managed in order to make PPP transparent (accountable), shared and accepted by the local communities . In essence, to make it truly ?participatory?. We are investigating the possibility of making PPPs more fully participatory through a computer-supported organisational memory capable of providing all actors with persistent traces linking argumentation and the evolving planning documents. We are exploring the possibility of mediating and capturing deliberation (brainstorming and argumentation), both face-to-face and online, in order to: ? promote more reflective interaction by making tangible the connections between planning options, arguments and other documents; ? build common awareness and understanding, not only of the environmental issue at stake, but also of the diversity of viewpoints and counterarguments in play; ? maintain coherence between the past and the future, by helping stakeholders to navigate the history of the project in helpful ways.

Here are the slides which were used during the presentation.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities