Join the Park!: Exploring Opportunities to Lower the Participation Divide in Park Communities

The current work explores the participation divide that is oftentimes at play within local citizen communities. The studied case illustrates a common situation where the majority of local citizens does not participate in public space improvement and maintenance activities organised by local community activists. The presented research involved...

Empowering community volunteers through matchmaking services

In Rotterdam, the participatory turn has spurred various bottom-up communities around public parks. These communities aim to take care of the parks in their neighbourhood and search for ways to demonstrate the societal value of their initiative. The current work explores how digital matchmaking services can strengthen community relationships. A...

Hack The Government!: Empowering Citizens to Make Meaningful Use of Open Data

Citizens’ use of Open Data is often limited to the use of apps. The design of the (app based) public service as well as the interpretation of the data is done for them. The organization of local hackathons can promote citizens’ data literacy and better use of available<br/>Open Data for service transformation purposes. This promises to nicely...