Eights years after launching its open source urban planning participation tool, DIPAS, the City of Hamburg continues to facilitate the incorporation of citizens feedback in urban development projects with DIPAS Analytics: An AI-power categorisation and visualisation toolkit to support project managers in handling the influx of citizens’ feedback.
Facilitating citizen participation
DIPAS was launched in 2016 by the Authority for Urban Development and Housing of the City of Hamburg, in partnership with the Urban Data Hub of Hamburg’s Geoinformation and Survey office, and the CityScience Lab of HafenCity University. Integrating online and on-site components, DIPAS facilitates public participation around urban planning projects by acting both as a centralised information hub and as a multistage digital participation process. DIPAS was open sourced upon its launch as a commitment towards transparency in public consultation processes.
Through the DIPAS navigator, citizens can easily find information about ongoing and past planning projects, related geo-spatial data and public consultations. The DIPAS navigator also enables citizens to contribute to the different consultation processes and access the results of past consultations in all transparency. On-site, public servants can use the DIPAS touchtable, “a media-free digital system”, to drive the exchange between urban planners and the public. The touchtable allows participants of in-person workshops to access urban geodata, digital models, and project simulations.
DIPAS Analytics: Supporting the expansion of the platform
To facilitate the evaluation process and scale up the number of consultations hosted on the platforms, DIPAS is now developing an AI categorisation and visualisation toolkit for project managers.
With this new toolkit project managers will be able to efficiently triage, organise, and visualise large amounts of text data submitted by citizens. Currently all feedback submitted to DIPAS has to be categorised and evaluated manually, DIPAS analytics will facilitate the handling of large amounts of feedback. The evaluation itself will remain an expert process.
DIPAS Analytics will be launched at the end of 2024. It is a direct response to the increasing number of urban planning projects managed on the DIPAS platform, and related increase in the amount of citizens’ feedback received. Since its launch DIPAS has been used in over 50 urban planning projects and was launched nationwide in June 2023.
Open source and public consultation: Ensuring full transparency for urban planning
Open source is a critical aspect of the DIPAS project to ensure transparency and interoperability. DIPAS Analytics will be published in open source upon it launch, and the source code for the current DIPAS platform is accessible via Open CoDE – a platform developed by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, and by the Federal States of Baden-Wurttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia to facilitate access to and exchange around open source solutions for public administration.
Projects such as DIPAS demonstrate the benefits of public administration developing open source solutions as a means to encourage citizens’ participation. Open source allows for the full scrutiny of the consultation processes, ensuring transparency and accountability from the early stages of urban planning by making decision-making visible and trackable.
Open source solutions also foster interoperability through easy adoption by other public administrations, DIPAS has already been adopted by the cities of Munich, Leipzig, and Bremem. DIPAS has been particularly popular with mobility projects, with a 2022 project in Hamburg receiving over 3000 contributions.
Featured image by Thor Alvis on Unsplash.