Towards a Context-based Citizen Participation Approach

Governments are more and more adopting Citizens' participation processes since they may help better understand needs and better reach communities' goals. With the emergence of ICTs, citizens' participation processes took new forms such as social media, blogs and participative platforms. Nevertheless, although citizens' participation outstands a great value for governments, its implementation raises several issues. Based on a review of the literature, this paper identifies a typology of issues regarding the implementation of CP processes. This paper is an attempt to open new research avenues on citizens' participation through the multidisciplinary typology of issues it proposes. As well, drawing on two categories of issues (citizens' and technology issues), a context-based citizen participation approach is proposed that is based on three main concepts: context-based reasoning, spatio-temporal representation, and visual analytics. Further empirical studies need to be established to assert the relevance of the proposed approach.