Moments and Modes for Triggering Civic Participation at the Urban Level

After more than a decade of e-participation initiatives at the urban level, what remains obscure is the alchemy - i.e., the “arcane” combination of elements - that triggers, and keeps alive, citizens’ involvement in major decisions that affect the local community. The experiences of the Community Informatics Lab with the Milan Community Network since 1994 and its two more recent spin-off initiatives enable us to provide a tentative answer to this question. This chapter presents these experiments and looks at election campaigns and protests as triggers for (e-)participation. It also discusses these events as opportunities to engender more sustained participation aided by appropriate technology tools such as software deliberately conceived and designed to support participation and managed with the required expertise.