Systematic Exploration of Strategic Alliance Models between Networked Digital Participatory Platforms for Open Urban E-Governance (SESAME)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jörg Rainer Noennig
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Operations Management and Computer Science for Business Administration
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551395390

Case studies and investigations on citizens’ participation in urban development have revealed the importance of involving people in the implementation of urban projects. Besides considering citizens’ practices and needs, and ensuring the continuity of actions and policies, the benefits include the harmonization of different interests and preferences, an increase in the education and awareness levels of the citizenry, chance to generate new ideas, among others. Co-production is now possible at a broad scale due to many-to-many interactivity and ubiquitous communication via the Internet. Participative technologies known as open governance aim to solve complex public policy issues and contribute to public knowledge. One of these technologies are the Digital Participatory Platforms for co-production in urban development (DPPs) which are specifically developed for participatory interaction and collaboration. Nevertheless, DPPs' applications to effectively encourage collaboration, interaction, and co-production of ideas and new services have not been yet widely adopted, and it is still challenging to engage a representative number of citizens and stakeholders for participatory processes in urban development projects. Additionally, the use of DPPs is mostly limited to the duration of specific projects. The creation and development of DPPs have been mainly tackled by cooperative international publicly funded research projects, city-driven innovation projects, or business-oriented tech startups. Although these ventures have produced promising pilot projects, the platforms commonly remain associated with single cities or specific urban project types, hence little data and knowledge tranfer are possible beyond these scopes. DPPs are neither networked nor are their systems interoperable – which is a core capability for reaching wider audiences, advancing sharing and learning processes, and enabling open, sustainable, and just urban governance. A methodological framework for forming a network of interoperable DPPs is still missing. To this end, the proposed project builds on strategic alliance models as an approach to establishing networks and aims at systematically exploring potential models between networked digital participatory platforms for open urban e-governance. It does so by: 1. Creating a descriptive framework of the different types of existing DPPs, with a special focus on the comparative assessment of their network capabilities and interoperability; 2. Surveying systematically existing models and concepts for strategic alliances and defining their relevance to DPPs; 3. Outlining and validating a new strategic alliance model, on the basis of the previous investigations. This project wants to create new insights regarding: ●Classification and characterization of DPPs. ● Methods and ways for networking DPPs. ●Characteristics of strategic alliances and their relevance to DPPs. ● Parametric assessment of strategic alliances for DPPs.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants