Participatory platforms and digital community analysis for +CityXChange project
This document analyzes a range of digital platforms to facilitate citizen participation in city making governing processes, making special emphasis on the implementation of these processes within +CityXChange project. This document was started on November 2018.
Studied platforms
For this analysis a number of digital plaforms have been selected. To make this selection several online resources have been consulted:
Previous analysis on plaforms and references
Scope
For the analysis open source plaforms have been selectedm, meaning projects that use licenses availed by the Open Source Initiative This licenses allow a exaustive study as well as the modification and distribution. Aditionally open source licenses allow the installation and creation of "sandboxes" so they can be study from an user perspective and all its different roles: final user, administrator, moderator and so on. Additionally a number of non open source plaforms might be mentioned on the analysis too on a specific chapter based on their relevance within the +cityxchange projects, being previously used by any of the follower cities or having any other particular feature that is consider relavant within the project.
Also the selected plaforms should be used in practical governance scenarios at city and/or municipal scale as well as by other civic, social and political organizations. An additional chapter will be included on "proof of concepts" and projects in early development stage.
Methodology
The information of each platform will be presented using the same structure. Each platform will be documented on a single page. Categories may be created to group plaforms with similar functionalities.
- Metadata
- Features
- Technical specifications
- Community
- Analysis
Metadata
- Name of the application
- URL of the project
- URL of the repository
- URL of a sandbox or test installation
- Brief description of the application
- Language programming language used
- Framework libraries used in its development
- Start date of the project
- Current version analyzed
- Number of contributors
- Popularity of the project (if present in social coding platforms such as github, need to find a standarized metric for a popular software project)
- Activity of the project (need to find a standarized metric for an active software project)
- License
- Responsive design
- Localization and multi language support
Features
Features and functionality will be described. Grouped by topic, scope, basic or advanced. (need more analysis)
Technical specifications
It will be documented at a technical level aspects such as architecture, modularity, extensions through addons or plugins, design flexibility via themes, and other services needed to set up the tool such as webserver, app server, database server, email server, external services or required external APIs such as Google Maps, etc.
Community
It has been decided that it is relevant to describe the community developing the project to understant the health and strengh of the project. NOTE it is still neccesary to find the metrics and way to describe this.
Analysis
In this chapter it is described how the plaform is used, case references and which features are of special interest for the +CityXchange project.