Urbanization has increased societal tensions and led to the growth of citizen participation in urban planning, which is often conducted in computer-supported environments and progressively online to include a high number of citizens. Past projects have shown that digital participation creates new challenges and that collaborative online discussions do not achieve the quality of on-site scenarios, as the interactions, in-depth exchange of opinions, and quality of contributions vary. Within a design science research project, we examine how to support citizens in creating comprehensible contributions on urban participation platforms. We identify issues, formulate meta-requirements, and derive design principles to implement feasible prototypes that we evaluated in focus groups. Our findings extend the existing research about urban participation platforms in civic tech, urban informatics, and planning, with validated design principles that specify AI-based feedback and further features to increase interactions and support citizens in producing more specific contributions.

System administrators (sysadmins) are key to keeping computer networks safe. As networks grow in size and complexity, partial workflow automation with the help of AI has been introduced to assist them. However, AI-aided tools often lack transparency, which may lead to the sysadmin’s reluctance to use the new software, slower response time in case of a security breach, and increasing errors. Related work suggests that the concept of social transparency (ST), when applied to the IT-security context, enables peer support and could provide the missing knowledge to the user facilitating explainability of the system and improving human-AI trust. In this paper, we investigate the profile of sysadmins and confirm that ST can indeed yield benefits for them but only when coupled with relevant contextual information and only when it adheres to the sysadmins’ quality standards. Finally, we contribute design recommendations for incorporating ST into the existing workflows of sysadmins.

Privacy Policies inform users about how their personal data is managed while fulfilling the obligatory requirements. Past studies have shown that users often do not read privacy policies, cannot comprehend the long and complex policy documents, and resort to providing their consent without knowledge. To enable users to make an informed decision, we explored serious games as a new medium to improve their understanding of privacy policies. In a mobile escape room game, users engage with the data collection and processing by solving different puzzles. We validated the game concept in a user study by comparing it to a conventional textual policy. Our findings show that the game promoted greater information recall in users. However, a trade-off seems to exist between frustration, duration and understanding. We show strategies for turning a privacy policy into game elements for a mobile escape room game and incorporating privacy information into different puzzles. We recommend that the choice of a privacy policy format should vary in a case-by-case scenario and should accommodate different target audiences.