Design Considerations for a Participatory Web Portal: Decision Support to Enhance Puget Sound Nearshore Improvement Timothy L. Nyerges University of Washington.

Design Considerations for a Participatory Web Portal:

Decision Support to Enhance Puget Sound Nearshore Improvement

Timothy L. NyergesUniversity of WashingtonDepartment of GeographySeattle 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

Research Staff– 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.

Partners– Puget Sound Regional Council

– King County– City of Seattle

Outline of Presentation

1. Introduction

2. Conceptual and Methodological Foundations

3. Two Examples of Substance

4. Web Portal Design Considerations

5. 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 ailingAll 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 SituationsFive 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…

• 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 modules4.1 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 ManagerBrainstorm 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.