CityMap discussions examples

The CityMap represents the map of participation activities in the city, allowing people to “tag” places of a territory with related discussions and documents. It aims to foster free dialog on community issues as the basis for establishing a climate of mutual trust among participants, for sharing civic intelligence and for promoting civic engagement.

In order to do this, each discussion is localized in a map (namely a Google Map©), but there is also the possibility of non localized discussions. Every free discussion is represented on the map by a small balloon icon: red if the discussion was started by a citizen, blue if it was started by a local government official. Larger blue balloons represent formally established participatory processes and link to deliberation space: blue because only local government can initiate a participatory process.

A free discussion is composed of an opening message and a set of messages replying to it. Opening messages may be posted only by registered participants. They are characterized by a subject (topic of discussion), a message body, and a geo-referenced point on the map. Replies can be posted both by unregistered and registered users (Issues of authentication and moderation are discussed below.). Every message is listed as soon as it has been sent but is readable only when approved by the moderator.

Replies can be tied to the opening message or to any other message in the discussion. To make the structure of the overall discussion immediately evident, we decided to display message headers at a glance on a single web page with appropriate indentation: A is indented from B if it is an answer to B. The message header contains the sender’s name, a small icon with the picture (or avatar) from the sender’s profile (if any), the date and time posted, and some other information. Thanks to a simple JavaScript, when someone wants to read a message, its body is opened (and then closed) within the same webpage that displays the message list. This solution also helps people to insert replies in the right place.

The system provides also an additional chance to comment on posted messages: instead of writing trivial texts such as “I totally agree with her” or “I disagree with him but I believe his arguments are worth considering” one can assign each post and each informational item two numerical values from 1 (low) to 4 (high) which express its degree of consensus and its degree of relevance.

This feature lends technological support for what Edward (2006) has termed different styles of citizenship: one “stronger,” more active, manifested by writing posts and another, “weaker,” shown by weighting consensus and relevance. The ‘votes’ thus attributed are displayed in posts’ and informational materials’ headers and can be used as a criterion for priority in reading a discussion.