In recent years, Digital Participatory Platforms (DPPs) have become an increasingly popular tool for citizen participation in community planning processes. They serve municipalities, citizen initiatives, and other planning authorities as digital tools to collect feedback, discuss ideas, solve problems and monitor small-scale planning processes within their communities. In addition, DPPs facilitate the integration of the spatial domain into participatory community planning. In this paper, we assess the most important Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of participatory community planning with geospatial DPPs, and analyze the potential, opportunities, and challenges associated with integrating these platforms into community planning. We analyze the results of a digital questionnaire that we shared with a selected group of expert scholars and community stakeholders. We then contextualize this feedback with our experiences from the piloting phase and commercial roll-out of the ‘Bürgercockpit’-application for participatory community planning within the Austrian Agenda21-framework. As a result, we identify the most important CSFs of participatory community planning with geospatial DPPs. This set of CSFs should provide a better orientation on how to complement well-established analog participatory methods and practices with geospatial DPPs for the co-production of shared visions and solutions, ultimately empowering all stakeholders of a planning process to better manage their communities.

Traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-programs rarely include participatory components that connect CSR-activities of private companies with their local communities. However, there is an increasing demand to include citizens as well as the resources and expertise of the private sector in the design and implementation of local community planning processes. To assess the potential, opportunities, and challenges of including private companies into participatory community planning at a local level, we analyzed the experiences that we collected during the piloting phase and the commercial roll-out of the ‘Bürgercockpit’-application for citizen participation, as well as the results of a digital CSR-questionnaire that we shared with different companies in Austria. Our research indicates that most of the participating companies are interested in including local communities into their CSR-projects using a digital tool, if this tool is easy-to-use, easy-to-access, and provides a flexible structure to address specific project requirements as well as properly designed features for stakeholder communication and user feedback. The findings of both, the ‘Bürgercockpit’-pilot study and the CSR-questionnaire provided us valuable input for designing a prototype solution of a digital CSR-tool for participatory community planning at a local level as well as recommendations for future research in this topic of growing interest.

In the future, farmers will have increasing opportunities to use collaborative smartphone applications for agricultural management. Geospatial information in combination with agricultural-relevant information is a great source of knowledge for farmers. Including maps in collaborative mobile agriculture applications benefits communication processes related to agricultural-relevant questions. Ensuring a positive user experience with map interfaces depends on their design. To develop design guidelines for map-oriented mobile agricultural applications, this study evaluates 24 different map design variations (varying in their elements and degrees of complexity) and characterizes their user experience with 72 coffee farmers as study participants. Our findings show that the most crucial factors for a positive user experience were restricted interactivity, simple tasks to conduct (selecting single point features), and a simplified base map style, highlighting relevant landmarks. Since our farmers consisted primarily of less-experienced smartphone and map users, our findings may also be helpful for users in general, sharing similar user characteristics. While empirical, in-situ studies pose many challenges, they provide relevant insights into the real use situation and user behavior of mobile map applications. Our findings help establish some basic principles for designing map adaptations, serving as a guideline for creating effective mapping applications, which adapt to the farmers' contextual factors. Based on our study results, we suggest future research for continuing conceptualizing principles of map design adaptation and support this effort through empirical, in-situ studies for relating contextual user factors to the adaptation behavior of map applications.

Mobile map applications are typically used by a broad range of users. Users can be diverse in their context attributes (e.g. map use experience, activities during map use), and several previous user experience (UX) studies have focused on understanding how some contextual factors influence the UX for designing maps that satisfy users' needs. A need for research remains to evaluate the relationship between user context, UX, and variants of mobile map element design. In this article, we present our research investigating the interplay of these factors through an empirical user study with citizens in Austria. We created an online survey and generated 84 map variations, combining seven map-related tasks, three base map styles, two map detail densities, and two time-pressure variants. We tested these map variations with 107 survey participants and related their UX to user context. Map-related tasks emerged as a dominant factor modifying the map design UX. Further results showed that interactivity loaded map-related tasks were aided when paired with low detail-dense base maps, contrasting overlay features. We recommend future research to analyze an extended set of context attributes with additional participant data, to evaluate dynamic variations in context, and to find ways to dynamically monitor mobile map design UX.

For designing qualitative interfaces for Public Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS), the user and use case should be clearly defined. However, PPGIS users may differ significantly, e.g. regarding their cultural background, IT-literacy, or interests. Studies examining varying user types and their impact on PPGIS usability are, however, lacking. In this paper, we analyse the user spectrum through conducting a usability study with 73 participants located in Colombia, Uganda and Austria. We combined a qualitative survey (conducted in all three countries) with an eye-tracking based survey (conducted only in Austria). Most of the usability issues arose due to inexperience in using interactive maps or applications other than social media. Based on the findings, we explored which user context information had an impact on which usability problem. With this, we designed an adaptation gradient that can be used for future research on developing adaptive PPGIS interfaces.

Agricultural development projects often struggle to show impact because they lack agile and cost-effective data collection tools and approaches. Due to the lack of real-time feedback data, they are not responsive to emerging opportunities during project implementation and often miss the needs of beneficiaries. This study evaluates the application of the 5Q approach (5Q). It shows findings from analyzing more than 37,000 call log records from studies among five countries. Results show that response rate and completion status for interactive voice response (IVR) surveys vary between countries, survey types, and survey topics. The complexity of question trees, the number of question blocks in a tree, and the total call duration are relevant parameters to improve response and survey completion rate. One of the main advantages of IVR surveys is low cost and time efficiency. The total cost for operating 1,000 calls of 5 min each in five countries was 1,600 USD. To take full advantage of 5Q, questions and question-logic trees must follow the principle of keeping surveys smart and simple and aligned to the project's theory of change and research questions. Lessons learned from operating the IVR surveys in five countries show that the response rate improves through quality control of the phone contact database, using a larger pool of phone numbers to reach the desired target response rate, and using project communication channels to announce the IVR surveys. Among other things, the respondent's first impression is decisive. Thus, the introduction and the consent request largely determine the response and completion rate.

◼ Of the 11 practices tested, five showed high adoption rates (>60%): controlled grazing, cut and carry, terraces and Desho grass, and agroforestry. Four practices registered medium levels of adoption (30-60%): improved wheat and potato varieties, crop rotation, residue incorporation and manure. The lower adoption (<10%) was associated with improved beans and improved livestock breeds, that was reported by only male-headed HH.

This dataset contains the files produced in the implementation of the “Integrated Monitoring Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture” in the Cauca Climate Smart Village (Colombia) in February 2018. This monitoring framework developed by CCAFS is meant to be deployed annually across the global network of Climate-Smart Villages to gather field-based evidence by tracking the progress on: