Get Together: A digital platform for urban social participation

Abstract

Citizens are the daily users of urban spaces and their facilities. It is important that they collaborate with local authorities for effective management, development, and maintenance of the cities they live in. Public participation although important is still developing in several European cities because its implementation poses difficulties. In this paper we argue that using digital technologies via a participatory digital tool, can empower citizens towards more engagement and collaboration on the city development. Despite the existence of several participation tools, we identified the lack of a tool that allows citizens to collaborate more actively in local development in a simple way. In this paper we introduce Get Together, a tool designed to improve collaboration between citizens and local authorities, that proposes a user experience that enables citizens to create design solutions, promote debate and perform a vote on the preferred solution, while having technical advice from municipal officials’ specialists.