Participation in Software Development: Experiences and Lessons From the Hin&Weg Project

Participatory planning holds important lessons for improving local government capabilities and responsiveness, but overall procedural regulations and statutory frameworks make its relevance for participatory IT development often just a matter of compliance. Developing analytical visualisations to support local government faces significant challenges because of the complexity and uncertainty about long-term benefits. We designed the process and local government staff understood their participation in an organised process. After each segment and the programming implementation, a new version of the software integrates improvements for participants.The participation process involved staff from ultimately 18 local governments. Participation became a verb describing the process that informed the directions to which we took up local government input.