Smart Participation Design: Prescriptive Knowledge for Bottom-Up Participation

Citizen participation is a vital aspect for smart cities, as solutions developed by and with citizens promote transparent and participatory collaboration within a city and foster the development and construction of a meaningful living environment. However, design knowledge on citizen-initiated and at the same time ICT-supported participation projects (referred to as Smart Participation) are scarce in practice and under-researched. In this paper, we follow a Design Science Research approach to create design knowledge for smart participation scenarios. Based on ten conducted expert interviews with active participants and issues identified within the literature, we create seven design principles. We subsequently evaluate the design principles with four additional experts who designed and are currently operating a large participation platform. Our results contribute prescriptive design knowledge for both practice and research on how to design and beneficially facilitate smart participation in the context of smart cities.