Samenvatting

In cities worldwide, tools for citizen-centric local initiatives to facilitate collaboration and joint decision-making are deployed as alternatives to the use of large corporate social media platforms such as Facebook. These community platforms often aim to empower users and enable civic participation in local (neighbourhood) developments, but not without encountering their own issues. Some of these platforms struggle to find the best ways to feature hyper- local issues on their online platforms, such as loneliness of the elderly or the infrastructure of the local landscape. Others might succeed in developing an easy-to-use platform, but lack a solid, motivated and consistent user base that supports the community initiative. In this cahier, we explore how we can use digital, visual and participatory research methods to strengthen civic organisations through improving their tools for citizen empowerment. Throughout the text, we will address both the process (the methods for mapping and the workshops for participatory mapping), and the substance of the research (i.e., the outcomes of the mappings and the results of the annotation workshops with the civic organisations). Additionally, we will show and discuss student projects that made use of our research, as input for their design processes.