Transcript Design Considerations for a Participatory Web Portal: Decision Support to Enhance Puget

Design Considerations for a
Participatory Web Portal:
Decision Support to Enhance Puget
Sound Nearshore Improvement
Timothy L. Nyerges
University of Washington
Department of Geography
Seattle Washington USA
[email protected]
Georgia Basin Puget Sound Research Conference
March 28, 2007
PGIST Project Team
Principals
- Tim Nyerges, UW
- Terry Brooks, UW
- Piotr Jankowski, SDSU
- Scott Rutherford, UW
- Rhonda Young, UWY
Partners
– Puget Sound Regional Council
– King County
– City of Seattle
Research Staff
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Adam Hindman, UW Geog
Jordan Isip, Integral GIS
John Lee, UW Geog
Arika Ligmann-Zielinska, SDSU Geog
Mike Lowry, UW Civil Engr
Michael Patrick, UW Geog
Kevin Ramsey, UW Geog
Martin Swobodzinski, SDSU Geog
Zhong Wang, UW Geog
Matt Wilson, UW Geog
Jie Wu, UW Geog
Tao Zhong, UWY Civil Engr
Guirong Zhou, UW Geog
PugetWorks, Inc.
Outline of Presentation
1.
2.
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5.
Introduction
Conceptual and Methodological Foundations
Two Examples of Substance
Web Portal Design Considerations
Conclusions and Prospects
1. Introduction
• A few items for backdrop:
– Urban-Regional Sustainable Development
– Research Questions
– Urban-Regional Decision Situations – Toward
Linking Some Answers
– Sustainable Development and Participatory GIS
Urban-Regional Sustainable Development
A major problem; perhaps the biggest the
world has seen in its history.
It hardly needs an introduction…
• Too much population, too few resources
• Too much pollution
• Global Climate Change
• Puget Sound land-waters are ailing
All regional problems…
Research Questions
Our Common Journey : Transition Toward Sustainability
(1999 US National Research Council Report) lists two
questions (numbers 6 and 7) about regional sustainable
development and information technology:
6. How can today’s operational systems for monitoring and
reporting on environmental and social conditions be
integrated or extended to provide more useful guidance
for efforts to navigate a transition toward sustainability?
7. How can today’s relatively independent activities of
research planning, monitoring, assessment, and decision
support be better integrated into systems for adaptive
management and societal learning?
Urban-Regional Decision Situations
Five decision situations are pervasive in urban-regional
communities around the world
• Planning – forecast/backcast/nowcast visions of a future
• Improvement Programming – budgeting the work to
address progress
• Project Implementation – focused activity in getting the
project work done
• Monitoring – assessing the progress in project, budget,
plan
• Emergency Management – Events causing chaos in the
above 4 situations
Disconnects abound. Some organizations beginning to
recognize the linkages between situations; leads us to
linked information systems for adaptive management
Sustainable Development and PGIS
• Urban-regional sustainable development is
an inter-organizational activity
• Participatory GIS as a sustainable
development information technology
• Scaling up and out are grand challenges
for PGIS design
• PGIS versus PPGIS – what matters is the
diversity of groups and getting work done
not the labeling of this or that.
2. Conceptual and Methodological
Foundations for this Research
• Some foundations for this work:
– Conceptual Foundations for PGIS web portal
design
– Methodological Foundations for PGIS web
portal design
• A brief overview of both…
Conceptual Foundations
• Sustainable development – a matter of
linking decision situations
• Participatory modes – communication,
cooperation, coordination, collaboration
• Workflow at multiple levels of process
granularity
• Emergent workflows – making it up within
reason
• Analytic-Deliberative decision processes
• Human-Computer-Human Interaction in large
groups to address complex problems
Methodological Foundations
• Model-Driven Architecture of System
– Four levels of abstraction…
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Business workflow
Functional capabilities to support workflow
Design of system capabilities
Implementation of system
• System considerations articulated in models
– At each level, a model is a collection of artifacts
• Artifacts express content, structure, process, context
of the system being developed
3. Two Examples of Substance:
Regional Sustainability Improvement
• Transportation Improvement
– Regional Transportation Investment District
• Habitat Improvement
– Puget Sound Nearshore Partnership
• Two good examples of linking…
– plans, programs, and projects
Regional Transportation Investment District
• Transportation infrastructure is a common pool
resource
• Funding regional project improvement has vexed
each county and the Puget Sound Regional Council
• WA State Legislature set up special district in 2003;
a three county area in central Puget Sound
• Focus of the NSF-funded PGIST Project, public
participation in regional transportation decision
making
• PGIST project list slightly different than RTID; but
focus is still about “packaging projects for funding”
• Multiple packages evaluated rather than single
package as being currently put forward to voters in
Nov ’07.
Puget Sound Nearshore Partnership
• Puget Sound Nearshore is a common pool resource
• Internalizing restoration problem in any one
organization has vexed each organization
• WA State Governor – Task Force to restore health of
Puget Sound
• Regional scale – local, state, national, international
organizations involved
• Puget Sound Nearshore Partnership with WA Dept
Fish and Wildlife Estuary and Salmon Restoration
Program
Nearshore Habitat Restoration
Decision Problem
• Nearshore Partnership’s project database
contains nearly 600 projects within Puget Sound.
• Comprised of nearshore projects solicited from
diverse organizations involved in restoration and
protection: salmon recovery groups, marine
resource committees, regional fishery
enhancement groups, land trusts, tribal natural
resource departments, and others.
• Problem: which projects to budget in any single
year; i.e. a “budgetary package”.
Similarity Between Two Situations
• What do web portal design considerations for
transportation project improvement decision making
have in common with habitat restoration?
• NSF-funded (1994-98) Collaborative Spatial Decision
Making tools were built for habitat restoration site
selection, then applied to transportation
improvement…now reverse…NSF-funded (2003-07)
PGIST Project could be applied to habitat restoration
• Both decision situations link to plans, both involve
“systems of projects” that are “programmed”, i.e.,
budgeted over several years
• Both situations composed of many stakeholder groups
with tremendously varying interests
4. Web Portal Design Considerations
for Enhancing Nearshore Improvement
• Current portal design is an on-line system
to support analytic-deliberative decision
process for large groups of people.
• Current system composed of five (principal)
portal modules
4.1 Workflow Manager
4.2 Concerns Manager
4.3 Alternatives Manager
4.4 Choice Manager
4.5 Report Manager
4.1 Workflow Manager
Workflow Manager - Classes
4.2 Concerns Manager
Brainstorm Tagging in Structured Discussion
Concerns Manager - PGIST Maps (using Goggle API)
linked to Structured Discussion using tags
4.3 Alternatives Manager- Review Projects
Review and Discuss Packages
4.4 Choice Manager – Spatial Equity
4.5 Report Manager
5. Conclusions and Prospects
At least three important questions to answer:
1. Are urban-regional sustainable
development problems too complex for
designs of information technology?
2. Can geospatial information technology
scale up and out?
3. In what way can the technology be
generalized to address sustainable
development problems?
1. Are urban-regional sustainable
development problems too complex for
designs of information technology?
• Preserving a quality of life at a high level
of economic development encourages us
to push forward no matter the complexity.
• Flexible theoretical framework
incorporating a participatory (deliberative)
democracy approach is good way to start.
2. Can geospatial information
technology scale up and out?
• Most people know only their immediate
surroundings; but familiar names
associated with valued resources make
scaling up possible.
• Workflow management must be unpacked
into multiple levels of process to keep
account for hundreds of people and
multiple organizations at different stages
of work for scaling out.
3. In what way can the technology be
generalized to address sustainable
development problems?
• Tension between customized and generalized
software solutions is nothing new – few-featured
that mostly works versus full-featured that
seldom works.
• Capabilities customized to “place” and
generalized to provide reliable, efficient,
effective, and equitable solutions is important to
a workable solution for most people.
• The participatory challenge continues…
Thank You / Questions?
Funding Acknowledgements
• CSDM Project supported by National Science Foundation
Grant No. SBR-9411021, funded jointly by the Geography
and Regional Science Program and the Decision, Risk
and Management Science Program.
• PGIST Project supported by National Science Foundation
Grant No. EIA 0325916, funded through the Information
Technology Research Program, and managed in the
Digital Government Program.
For all of the above, any opinions, findings,
conclusions, or recommendations expressed are
those of the researchers involved.