Abstract
In Rotterdam, the participatory turn has spurred various bottom-up communities around public parks. These communities aim to take care of the parks in their neighbourhood and search for ways to demonstrate the societal value of their initiative. The current work explores how digital matchmaking services can strengthen community relationships. A research-through-design approach is applied to identify the main barriers hindering community participation. The final design Park Makers uses both Citizen-to-Activity matching and Citizen-to-Citizen matching as ways to engage citizens in the community. The corresponding research demonstrates that connecting park users (or better: future volunteers) with another citizen or activity matching their personal interest fosters community engagement. From this point of view, it might be interesting to focus further research on the potential value of other matchmaking principles, or even other services, for bottom-up citizen communities.
Keywords
citizen participation, community engagement, public parks, service design, social cohesion
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2018.16
Citation
Slingerland, G., Mulder, I.,and Jaskiewicz, T.(2018) Empowering community volunteers through matchmaking services, in Anna Meroni, Ana María Ospina Medina, Beatrice Villari (eds.), ServDes 2018: Service Design Proof of Concept, 18–20 June, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2018.16
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Papers
Empowering community volunteers through matchmaking services
In Rotterdam, the participatory turn has spurred various bottom-up communities around public parks. These communities aim to take care of the parks in their neighbourhood and search for ways to demonstrate the societal value of their initiative. The current work explores how digital matchmaking services can strengthen community relationships. A research-through-design approach is applied to identify the main barriers hindering community participation. The final design Park Makers uses both Citizen-to-Activity matching and Citizen-to-Citizen matching as ways to engage citizens in the community. The corresponding research demonstrates that connecting park users (or better: future volunteers) with another citizen or activity matching their personal interest fosters community engagement. From this point of view, it might be interesting to focus further research on the potential value of other matchmaking principles, or even other services, for bottom-up citizen communities.