This section contains the Thesis introduction.

1. Introduction

Introduction

In general terms, my thesis is that information technologies (IT) developed in the last 30 years, and consolidated only recently, constitute a qualitative jump from past IT and have the potential to enable a vastly improved public participation in decision making, but requires a specific, new institutional and regulatory framework to fully materialize such potential.

Two inter-dependent classes of questions arise from this general thesis: questions on technology and questions on process. I argue that this duality process-technology is inescapable if we want to understand the fast moving new trends in decision making and their institutional implications. I call this duality the "Plato's Principle": for it was Plato that wrote that democracy cannot extend beyond the reach of a man's voice, and it is part of my argument that technology is extending the reach of human voice in such mode and degree that new forms of democracy are being enabled today, forms that were no more than an utopian dream not so long ago.

Based on past research, I chose to focus on the combination of artificial intelligence with multimedia computer and network technology, applied in the context of citizen consultation by both national and local government agencies, within the domain of impact assessment. The rationale for this choice will become apparent through the thesis.

My main research case is the public consultation process on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for a solid urban waste incinerator in Portugal, in 1996. The context is the planning process centered on the realization of the World Expo 1998 in the oriental part of Lisbon, Portugal, with planned large developments of transportation infrastructure, drastic land use changes, and environmental clean-up.

New mandatory EEC - European Union (EU) directives regarding public participation in environmental impact assessment, and new national laws regulating city master plans, gave this and related cases a high profile as a test for all entities involved: Portuguese national government, local governments of Lisbon and Loures, the EU, private developers, and citizen's NGOs. Given the sensitivity of such kind of decisions, and also the strong reactions from citizens on the occasion of a previous process of siting a hazardous waste incinerator, both government agencies and environmental NGO's were strongly motivated to shift the focus of the debate from political and short-term considerations to a more technical and long-term reasoning. This created both a favorable condition for the introduction of new IT into the process, and the challenge of well defined expectations for the effect of these new IT.

My thesis research builds upon the course work done and elements of past research. Among others, my MSc. thesis (Ferraz de Abreu 1989), in what concerns the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate public access to computer technology; my study on the effect of market forces in recycling programs (Ferraz de Abreu 1992), in what concerns the dynamics of grass-root participation in development processes; my research on infrastructure shortfalls, in what concerns the use of AI techniques to model impact assessment as an inference net of primary and secondary consequences; my research on the Bertaud model (Ferraz de Abreu 1993), in what concerns the relationship between information technology, planning processes requiring multiple domain expertise, and community participation; my research on natural resources management, in what concerns the use and modeling of case-based reasoning; my research on the cultural-dependent impact of GIS in privacy issues (Ferraz de Abreu 1994), in what concerns the individual dimension of the consequences of applications of the new IT; and several case studies of information systems user need assessments for city governments, in what concerns the role of computer Browser tools in local decision-making.

In this thesis , I present my hypothesis or point of depart; the questions that are at the center of my research; the typical scenarios in which they occur; the methodology I followed; the scientific traditions and bodies of literature that support this research; the case study and thesis experiment used to collect direct evidence; the analytical reasoning concerning the IT qualitative jump; the suggested research agenda for this domain; and finally the conclusions. The main bibliographic references are identified, and research records are included in the appendix.

This section concerns the Thesis basics and includes the chapters:

1. Hypothesis

2. Research Questions

3. Thesis Methodology

4. Thesis Roadmap

In general terms, my early working hypothesis was that "current state-of-the-art information technologies (IT) have the potential to enable significant changes in the current decision making processes in public institutions, in what concerns the direct participation of the citizens and the intercommunication among technical staff with different backgrounds" [Thesis Proposal, 1995]; and that some of these changes are already taking place.

I use the expression "current state-of-the-art information technologies", or "new IT", as referring to a specific set of recent technology developments, described in this thesis, that I argue to represent a specific qualitative jump. While it is reasonable to expect new qualitative jumps to occur in the future, as they did in the past, my thesis addresses this specific "new IT".

I define here "public participation" as a loose combination of direct participation by individual citizens and/or their NGOs, and experts, even if provided by other government agencies, in a decision making process. I will argue that this more inclusive definition is important, because it is an open question whether "public vs. expert" participation is a false dichotomy.

• The process facet of public participation concerns a) the choice of timing and opportunities to involve citizens before, during and after the decision making; b) the choice of techniques of participation; c) the degree of influence citizens may have in the final decision and in aftermath monitoring mechanisms.

• The technology facet of public participation concerns the choice of ITs used or made available in each step of the process, and the attributes of the used IT, relevant to the process.

Naturally, the formulation of the hypothesis evolved during thesis research. The major evolution resulted from observing the heavy weight of the current institutional and regulatory framework in the process of introduction of new IT. Consequently, my hypothesis became that modern IT have the potential to enable a vastly improved public participation in decision making, but requires a specific, new institutional and regulatory framework to fully materialize such potential.

I considered this working hypothesis as encompassing several aspects, some of which I intended to test with a research experiment within a case study, prove others by documented research and analytical reasoning, while transforming the remaining into reasonably well-founded assumptions, within defined boundaries, through observation and discussion of published research. Specifically,

A.1) - That better public participation is in general consequential to better decision making (necessary, but not sufficient).

A.2) - That there is such a thing as "commonly used" decision-making procedures within democracies in developments requiring environmental impact assessment (EIA), general enough to constitute a meaningful working basis for this thesis.

A-3) That the use of information systems is a useful component of decision-making.

T.1) That new IT can help lay, common citizens play a more knowledgeable and effective role, in public consultation concerning decisions involving technical arguments.

T.2) - That new IT can impact decision-making procedures: including and up to the point where many of the current procedures become inadequate and require a new regulatory framework.

T.3) - That you need specific IT to best support a specific kind of public participation; and that IT solely promoted by the so-called "free market forces" does not satisfy this need, neither fulfills all the potential that new IT has in this domain.

T.4) - That the presence alone (or even introduction) of new IT does not necessarily promote better public participation nor improve decision-making procedures favoring public participation and is actually unlikely to do so, unless a) there is a good understanding of the underlying planning paradigms in presence, and b) an effort is made to shape both new IT and a new institutional framework in order to build bridges between these planning paradigms.

T.5) - That the current stage of development of information technologies corresponds to a qualitative jump in the technology substructure of society, as compared with the time when "modern" decision-making consolidated into current commonly used procedures within democracies.

There is an underlying duality in this general hypothesis: process and technology. Besides the characterization of what I argue to represent an IT qualitative jump, I researched therefore two inter-dependent classes of questions arising from it:

On one hand, which major modifications (if any) are occurring in processes of public consultation due to the new IT? Is there evidence that current processes are becoming inadequate given the new IT developments? Which improvements are enabled by this new IT? Do we need new planning and/or political frameworks? If so, what must change?

On the other hand, what is (if it is) qualitatively different in new IT from past IT, in regard to public participation? In what form can the new IT best serve public participation ? What must be modified, or extended, in available IT to best responds to the requirements of such institutional processes?

In order to narrow down the scope of these questions, it was fundamental to specify both targeted IT and processes. My focus was the combination of artificial intelligence (mainly knowledge representation), multimedia computer technology and Internet, applied in the context of public participation in decision making by government agencies, within the domain of impact assessment review for large development projects (infrastructure shortfalls and environment).

Given the nature of the hypothesis, I chose to lead a research experiment within a case study, as the core of thesis methodology.

The thesis experiment consisted of changing one of the macro-variables (introduction of a specific set of new IT) in a well defined scenario with clear boundaries and time frame (EIA review of a proposed development), to observe the other macro-variable (public participation in the decision-making process), and test a few models of expectations derived from the hypothesis. Such models are discussed in the "Experiment Models" chapter (in "The Experiment" section).

A case study with an integrated experiment is a convenient methodological approach to test my hypothesis, since it allows us to control the specific set of new IT introduced in the process and to focus on a single case, allowing an in-depth study of the effects (as opposed, f.i. to comparative analysis), thus with better conditions to detect unexpected phenomena.

However, the same nature of the hypothesis requires a larger analytical framework that goes beyond a case study. Therefore, the thesis experiment, while central to this research, is integrated in a more global document research and analytical reasoning.

My general thesis research methodology was as follows:

a) Identification of research question and domain focus of the thesis, as summarized above;

b) Formulation of hypothesis, idem;

c) Review of the state-of-the-art for both the information technology and public participation domains (available technology, body of knowledge, current research and approaches), through literature review and experimentation with technology;

d) Development of an advanced software prototype for the thesis experiment;

e) Design of a thesis experiment applicable in a case study;

f) Search and selection of case study (first, concerning the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for an incinerator for hazardous waste, then, because this development was canceled, concerning the EIA for an incinerator for urban waste);

g) Set up a project proposal for the thesis experiment within the case study, integrating a team of experts, institutional protocols and funding arrangements;

h) Reformulating of hypothesis, after considering the concrete settings of the case study and a preliminary analysis;

i) Execution of experiment, in three phases: before, during and after the public consultation period of the EIA review;

j) Analysis of case study and discussion of results;

k) Analysis and discussion of the technology and institutional context, together with the new questions raised by the experiment, contributing to a research agenda;

l) Draw Conclusions.

The main research methods and techniques I used were:

These techniques were therefore an integral part of my thesis methodology.

Given that the thesis engaged many steps and facets, I found it useful to provide next a kind of road map to what is presented.

In this chapter I present an overview of the thesis sections and chapters, in order to facilitate the reading process.

In this section I provide the foundation to my thesis argued assumptions, and the general thesis argument, through extensive literature review and discussion of the bodies of knowledge it builds upon. It includes the chapters:

Assumptions; Public Participation Review; Information Technology Review.

To build upon and test my hypothesis, it is important to review the state-of-the-art for both the public participation and information technology domains (body of knowledge, current research and approaches, available technology, role of information systems in decision making), through literature review and experimentation with technology. In particular, this review and experimentation provides the foundation for the few assumptions in the formulation of the hypothesis and the choice of methodology, what I called "argued assumptions":

There are many views on the objectives and role of public participation. It is important to briefly review and discuss here the state-of-the-art of the research in this domain, particularly by the time of the thesis experiment. The discussion on current trends towards public participation and its relationship with IT developments, is left for subsequent chapters.

The review of public participation research (previous chapter) shows the privileged status of public participation in environmental impact assessment (EIA), making it the favored ground for my thesis research. In this chapter I discuss the criteria for narrowing down the information technologies (IT) that are the focus of this thesis; I review the recent IT developments in question, in particular those that best serve public participation; I discuss more in detail knowledge representation models, based both on literature review and my previous work in this area; and finally I suggest a classification of information systems for impact assessment, according to their role and use level.

My thesis methodology incorporates at the core of the research an experiment, in the context of a case study, in order to test the introduction of selected information technologies in a public participation process. In this section I define, describe and discuss the problem motivating and guiding the experiment; the design steps it implied, including the elaboration of scenarios to bring a context to the problem and a preliminary discussion of possible variables and criteria of success; the Intelligent Multimedia System prototype that represented the new information technologies to test; and finally the long process of searching and selecting an adequate Case Study where the experiment could take place. It includes the chapters:

Introduction; The Problem; The Scenarios; The Intelligent Multimedia System Design; The Experiment Design; The Quest for a Case Study

In this chapter I describe these classes of problems and the analysis I performed relating them with potential IT support systems, in order to build a preliminary framework for the thesis experiment design and provide a solid criteria for the case study selection.

In this chapter I introduce a short series of (3) composite scenarios, compiled as an abstraction built upon typical research cases I studied and considered relevant to my thesis.. The objectives of these composite scenarios were to narrow down the class of problems my thesis is focused on, as discussed in the previous chapter, defining the typical profile of the targeted cases; to identify the kind of variables that were the object of research, and to briefly summarize (for each class of problems) the specific methodology .

The main vector to introduce IT in the experiment was the Intelligent Multimedia System software prototype. Using my training as computer engineer and the experienced acquired during my master thesis research in intelligent graphic interfaces, I programmed a first version of an "Intelligent Multimedia System" (IMS) prototype. Besides the expert system module, my new development efforts went towards two major directions: Multimedia Book and Knowledge-based virtual office. In this chapter I describe the essential of these developments, that were an integral part of the experiment design. The final IMS prototype, with its "real world" content, resulting from these early design stages, is described in more detail in the Experiment section.

In this chapter I present a new scenario emerging from the previous composite scenarios, in which new IT is introduced (Intelligent Multimedia System - IMS), and my original estimated implications (of introducing IMS) in the process itself are projected. The assumption is of an optimal case, where all the introduced changes produce their best expected results. The objective of this projected scenario was to facilitate the design of an experiment, consisting in the introduction of the prototype of an IMS, as described in the previous chapter, in a case with public participation, in order to evaluate the impact of the different attributes and features brought by the new IT.

In this chapter it is described the search and selection process for the most adequate case study for this thesis research, and discussed briefly a few candidate cases and the criteria used in the selection.

In this section, I present the details of the thesis experiment. It includes the chapters:

Introduction; The Case; The Actors; The Experiment Models; The Chronology; The Expert Panel; The Collaborative Tools; The FAQ Model; The Institutional Response; The Knowledge Acquisition; The System; The Public Consultation; The Knowledge Gap; Results Summary

To conduct the thesis experiment, I set up a fairly large research project to test the use of some specific "state-of-the-art" information technologies in the EIA review process, in particular the public consultation process. This chapter describes the main goals (testing process and technology) of the project, with a brief summary of the case study in which it is based (EIA review for a Solid Urban Waste Incinerator in Lisbon Metropolitan Area), its institutional context (actors and stake holders), and of the software prototype ("Intelligent Multimedia System" - IMS) plus Internet components I developed for this purpose.

The decision to build an incinerator for solid urban waste in the Lisbon metropolitan area had many ramifications (urban waste management strategy, site location, relation with Expo'98, central and local administration responsibilities, institutional process of decision), all of which raised strong controversy. In this chapter I describe the main settings of the case, concerning what was the object of decision, who was involved in it, how the situation had evolved at the time my research became a part of the process and in which conditions the research project was set.

With the case study selected (CTRSU) and with the basic IT tools to be used in the experiment already available (IMS prototype), I proceeded to meet with the different actors involved in order to characterize more precisely their specific perceptions of the problems that could be addressed by the new IT, and thus map their expectations for this experiment. This chapter describes the actors identified, their formulation of the problem, their initial expectations vis-a-vis the introduction of new information technologies and the level of support for the thesis experiment. How this support evolved (and wavered, in a few cases), will be treated in the chapter discussing results.

The approach I used in the Thesis experiment was to introduce a specific set of new IT in the EIA review process (my software prototype, plus Internet components, plus content), with suggested guidelines.

In order to achieve a reliable and meaningful set of knowledge content for the system, I put together a multidisciplinary panel of experts. To keep a focus all through this complex research context, and using also the input from the expert panel, I compiled a set of models (decision making process; public participation process; knowledge representation; knowledge acquisition; IT user behavior and performance) according to precedent in traditional settings in past cases, and then built models of expectations, resulting from the introduction of my system (IT and guidelines).

This chapter describes such models and the specifics of the experiment methodology.

This chapter presents a chronology of its main events and actions, establishing a timeline to facilitate a synoptic view of the multiple facets of the experiment

During a first phase, the Expert Panel discussed the target audience for the IMS, set a strategy to organize data and concepts, built and classified a vocabulary base, and contributed to define taxonomies for the IMS knowledge units. In this chapter I present the essentials of the work done by the Expert Panel and some of the issues raised in the process, concerning both the knowledge structure and the requirements of a collaborative enterprise.

In order for the Expert Panel to function, it was necessary to create a collaborative infrastructure support. Without it, it would not have been possible to obtain the contributions from senior experts, extremely busy with their own normal work. It was also difficult to integrate the work from different perspectives brought by different backgrounds, and here again collaborative tools were fundamental. But the need for these tools extended beyond the Expert panel; it reached institutional actors in charge of the EIA Review, although in a lesser scale and depth. In this chapter I present the conditions that led to install or implement such tools, and the way they were applied.

After building a good size vocabulary and classifying it, creating in the process a dual taxonomy (domain and issue), there remained only one thing to complete the knowledge acquisition framework: identify the main knowledge representation model to use in the IMS and define its metadata descriptors. The Expert Panel option was unequivocally in favor of a variation of the case-based representation: the FAQ ("Frequently Asked Questions") model. In this chapter I briefly present this option, its rationale and form, and my view of the alternative rule representation for this case.

In the sequence of the work generated by the IMS Expert Panel, I began circulating among all institutional actors, namely the environmental NGO’s, facility promoter, governments (national and local) and public administration, a first version of the proposed FAQ structure and a seed list of questions. The main purpose was to obtain feedback for the proposed structure, gather more suggestions for questions and begin to collect answers and other support documentation. In this chapter I present the essential institutional response.

In this chapter I present the guidelines I defined for the question / answer compilation process, a sample of the questions included in the final FAQ; and specially the process of compiling, formatting and publishing the EIA-related answers.

In this chapter I present the major components of the system presented for public consultation and the EIA review process in general: the components of the prototype of the Intelligent Multimedia System and a web component.

In this chapter I describe the public consultation process, which included two public hearings and experiment work, such as an opinion survey and the use of IMS (both prototype and web).

For comparative and control purposes, I also tested IMS with students from undergraduate programs. The test included an opinion survey -- the same done during the public consultation -- and a knowledge test. This chapter describes this controlled experiment, the knowledge test content and the results both from the survey and the test.

In this chapter I present a brief summary of the experiment findings. The discussion is left for next section.

In this section I discuss in-depth some of the findings from the thesis experiment. For that purpose I begin by discussion an overview of the findings, such as: No visible Bias from introducing new IT (shifting from more "no opinion to opinion", rather than change of opinions); Expert vs. Lay participation was not the great divide. Rather, it was "motivated vs. less motivated"; Memory attribute of web-based information (sustainability); The costs of the process with IT and who pays them; Obstacles from regulatory and institutional framework to the compilation and use of the data. Then, I focus on two of the more interesting findings, that require further analysis:

a) FAQ model performance and its compilation paradoxes;

b) Planning Paradigms (hierarchical vs. rational vs. pragmatic).

In this section I proceed to argue, through analytical reasoning, the fourth component of my thesis :

T.5). Does "the current stage of development of information technologies correspond to a qualitative jump in the technology substructure of society, as compared with the time when "modern" decision-making consolidated into current commonly used procedures within democracies" ?

After a brief discussion of the nature of the problem, in order to provide a solid foundation to this thesis, I question what makes current information technology a qualitative jump compared with past stages of IT? I discuss IT attributes (reach, added processing, equity, transaction costs) for different kinds of IT, and introduce a historical classification based on this criteria, which allows to argue towards a correlation between IT attributes with enabling/constraint factors regarding decision making and public participation.

In this section I review what evidence was obtained from experiment and research,, regarding each one of the four hypothesis formulated (T1 to T4); and present the Thesis conclusions.