- Online engagement – linking their digital world to ours   2165 kb by    Powell, Marissa | marissa.powell@arup.com    Short Outline See how bespoke e-engagement/spatial mapping tools have been used to enhance stakeholder and community engagement processes for planning projects. This approach both broadens the reach of engagement programs resulting in more representative datasets and provides this data in formats that can be easily integrated into planning processes. Abstract People who attend stakeholder and community engagement activities often fit into one of three categories – retirees and people with time of their hands, people who stand to lose something of value to them and people who are passionate about a cause or issue (and your project just happens to fit into this category). They are the ultra-motivated, the people who turn up to meetings and displays and unfortunately the people who skew our engagement data as they are not representative of the broader population. The rest of us sit in the “I should get involved but I’m too busy”, the “that’s kind of interesting, but not enough to make me do anything”, the “I planned to go but I forgot” or the oblivious to the entire situation category. It’s this larger group of people that we’re missing through traditional approaches to engagement and they are the most important to ensuring representative input is fed into our planning processes. To engage these people we have to understand how to make it easy for them to participate in the discussion especially when they are usually time poor, they want to give and get information quickly and they now carry their digital life with them wherever they go. The other side of the story is that it’s time consuming, and often difficult, to translate rafts of qualitative data gained through engagement processes into something meaningful that we can use to inform planning decisions. To address both these issues, an online e-engagement tool named Collaborative Community Map was developed to give stakeholders the opportunity to provide meaningful input into spatial planning processes. It was borne out of a desire to gather a more representative data set from stakeholders by allowing people to participate in engagement activities at a time and place that suits them. It is a light weight mapping application that is viewed in a standard internet browser and uses the Google Maps interface as its source of mapping data. It allows people to participate in engagement activities and provide information from their own computers, thus broadening the reach of engagement programs. It gathers spatially located data to assist project teams in mapping constraints and concerns associated with planning and design proposals by enabling stakeholder comments and their associated locations to be mapped. These can then be drawn into a GIS environment for further analysis and visualisation. This paper explores a number of case studies where the Collaborative Community Map was used during planning processes. It shows how by linking their digital world to ours we have gathered more representative datasets, made the engagement process more transparent, broadened the reach of our engagement program and gained valuable spatial data which has helped us to better understand the places and spaces we are planning. This approach is applicable to any spatial planning process. Visit www.collaborativemap.org to view the mapping tool. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper