During the 2002 Conference, attendees were given the
opportunity to identify "hot buttons"--critical issues, questions and
challenges facing the PPGIS community. They were asked to write down their
overall reflections as well as responses to presentations. These were
synthesized into high priority issues and used to stimulate discussion at a
“town meeting” on the last day of the conference.
At this town meeting, attendees first formed small discussion
groups to address the highest priority issues identified during the conference.
Volunteer facilitators then guided the discussions and attendees ranked issues
by importance, and then recommend ways to answer/address them. The "Town
Meeting" wrapped-up with reports from the groups and reflections from our
key-note speaker.
Below is a categorization and synthesis.
(Thanks to the
following people for transcribing and refining the questions: Wolf Naegeli,
Peter Bilton, Jon Dorwart, Sarah Williams, Meg Merrick, Paul S. Hughes, Cindy Copp, Marc Schlossberg, and Doug
Aberley—Renee Sieber, conference chair.)
Definitions
What is PPGIS: Is it a practice, a tool, a process, a
science? Is it explicitly normative, ethical?
How far does PPGIS extend? To manual approaches? To other
technologies (spreadsheets? CADD)? Should PPGIS be renamed? For example, Public
involvement GIS, Community-integrated GIS, Community Mapping.
Who is "public"? The poor, the general public, the
neighborhood association, the realtor? How do you engage the public if they're
tired, don't have time? Who's empowered by these tools?
What is "participation"? How much is enough? The
word "participation" has considerable institutional baggage (e.g.,
counting hits on a web site, counting “bums in seats”). Maybe it should be
defined as early, meaningful and continuous
involvement. There's lots of faith and assumptions that public
participation will just work because you believe in it.
Many projects narrowly focus on one aspect of either public
or participation but not the spectrum. There's not much "public" in
PPGIS (i.e., papers focus on community groups but not the general public). Want
more about benefits to the public and not just to companies or consultants.
Perhaps there should be less focus on GIS and more on community--collection of
data, planning process, community involvement.
How do we empower the grassroots during the planning process
not just at the selection of alternatives? GIS should be used to create
alternatives, and evaluate and analyze them. How do we reclaim empowerment from
whomever is defining the values, (most likely) the technical elites?
Preliminary Definition (offered by some attendees): to
provide opportunities of input from citizens, organizations and institutions
into public decision making. PPGIS is an umbrella term that includes citizens,
nonprofits and voluntary associations, existing public agencies and their
current mandates for public participation, democratic processes, and
organizational collaboration.
The
placement of PPGIS
Where does PPGIS “live” (as a concept or a domain of
knowledge, but also the physical location of the GIS)? Where will PPGIS
eventually live (i.e., after you finish your project and go away)?
Is PPGIS just a tool that should be subsumed into
community-based or citizen-based planning or bioregional planning?
Should the discussion of PPGIS be broadened to include
community based research design, participatory action research? There are many
tools besides GIS that would be of use to community-based organizations. How do
we integrate other research methods with PPGIS? In these research models,
communities help pose the questions, collect data, interpret data, disseminate
data and document data. Should these be the values of PPGIS?
We need to engage more theories of citizen participation. We
could bring in other literatures, disciplines for a broader perspective and to
determine if PPGIS is similar or unique.
How about coupling GIS support with existing nonprofit
support institutions?
Current PPGIS is focused on quality of life and social
justice issues. How can PPGIS be incorporated into routine public
agency-initiated public participation such as transportation planning?
Data
Data is crucial. We should focus on data acquisition and ownership.
Just because you have data today doesn't mean you'll have it tomorrow.
Should there be a mechanism for storing, centralizing, and
distributing data so that communities have improved access? This includes data
created by public agencies and by communities.
There are ethical issues in data. We all want data (maybe
even personal data) but there are privacy issues. How do we represent the
stories of the vulnerable while also protecting their privacy and interests?
How do we build capacity to handle data?
How to handle issues of top-down v. bottom-up; proprietary
v. open access data? Lots of data has no public participation in it. Instead,
it's already massaged. Should we be advocating for greater data access, public
information disclosure laws? Is there a universal model for access, for
example, data clearinghouses?
Measures
and Outcomes
What are the outcomes/goals and how do you measure them? How
do you handle undisclosed, changing goals and goals that differ by interest
group?
What is the goal of PPGIS? Spatial literacy? Advocacy?
Learning about democracy? Access? Communication? Capacity building? Should we
just educate and then let communities/citizens choose to act (or not)?
How do we ensure sustainability: in capacity building, data
access, training, funding, maintenance (data, hardware, software)?
We should ensure transparency in PPGIS. But what is
transparency? How do we reduce the jargon?
What is the best practice of PPGIS?
Publics
Youth involvement is good. Youth are usually frozen out of
the decision making process (e.g., don't have a right to vote). At the same
time, we don't want age discrimination (don't want to "freeze" out
seniors because we don't think that they can learn new technologies). Is
virtual GIS/modeling the hook to involve youth? Or maybe the hook is something
like controversial issues?
New
technologies and Old practices
Why is there intense interest in PPGIS?
Virtual GIS (simulations, modeling, alternate scenarios)
takes lots of time. Does it provide greater participation? We need to be more
aware of real communities and not the abstract.
Who is the public in online applications of GIS? How does
"public" GIS rise above the value and impact of a video game? Does
interactive spatial modeling simply devolve into a game to play? How do
interactive websites differ from all other websites vying for attention?
Many presentations discussed new technologies and using the
Internet as a form of community participation in planning. But are we replacing
community forums with technology? Old-fashioned maps with GIS? Are we losing
something in the process? For example, there was a gulf between the
decentralized, people-oriented, small-scale, and face-to-face nature of the
plenary speaker's [Doug Aberley's] examples and the mega-sized, instant
electronic voting type of public participation in the NYC example [voting on
preferences for the World Trade Center site]. Where in the latter do you find
the three-way conversations* that happen by chance and result in unexpected
solutions? The larger the group the more time needed to do participation.
Do we lead a community with GIS, or are we creating a new
community with the technology.
For instance, in the era of sprawl, are we creating
community, rather than preserving an existing community?
*According to Al-Kodmany's presentation, one-way
communication provides static information to the public (web GIS); two-way
communication can occur between planners and the public in collaborative
planning; three-way communication occurs among different publics.
Roles
What is the role of non-governmental organizations' (NGO's)
vis-à-vis citizens in PPGIS? Should they be facilitating public understanding?
Act on behalf of?
What is the role of the private consultant? Can s/he do
PPGIS but never involve the public (e.g., do contract work per request of a
foundation for nonprofit)?
What is the role of government? Supplier of data, builder of
coalitions?
What is the role of the university?
Who's responsible to ensure participation? Who drives the
participation, the use of GIS?
Should a professional facilitator be hired? Should a
facilitator be objective (and what is objectivity)? Should s/he be prejudiced
towards the public?
Should the PPGIS "chauffeurs" (see Haklay's
presentation) be as objective as possible? How do we prevent our opinions from
predominating?
Overall, what is the role of the expert? For example, what
happens when a community-based organization doesn't have the time or energy to
be "empowered" but should be?
Should GIS be available to everyone? For example, militia
men? Just groups involved in good things like sustainability, social justice?
What about competing interests in the same geography?
How do we begin talking about structures, linkages and
partnerships?
Scale
The
presentations focused on big cities or communities. Not rural areas nor global
issues.
Is
PPGIS only very local, very tangible? For example, how could you map capital
flows; how can PPGIS work across borders?
What
are the limits of working across different scales? For example, the public may
participate precisely because it's local and become disinterested at another
scale (say, national). What are the limits of working at one scale?
Values,
Ethics and Standards
What are the values of PPGIS? Are there certain values that
we should promote?
How can PPGIS be used to alter the power imbalances of
society to benefit marginalized populations? Presentations at this conference
seemed to be very conservative/traditional in reinforcing existing power
structures, for example, between experts and communities.
Should we be promoting an insurgent/subversive/guerrilla GIS
instead of an institutional PPGIS?
What about creating an open source GIS/PPGIS? A collectively
owned GIS?
How do we get more money/find more money for communities to
do PPGIS?
Should we create ethical standards for PPGIS? What should
they be?
Are there GIS technologies that we should not endorse?
What about the "human subjects" issue? This is a
huge issue for academics conducting research in communities.
Should we create other standards for PPGIS: for example, in
visual communication? GIS/maps should be intuitive/easy to comprehend and often
they are not.
Should we be involved in professional development of
PPGISers? How do we retain institutional knowledge? How do we find each other
to build partnerships and our own capacity?