Promoting Citizen Participation through Gamification

Abstract

This paper presents TAB Sharing, a web-based and mobile platform for e-participation. With TAB Sharing citizens are empowered to create and share proposals with Public Administration (PA) actors and other citizens. They can submit a problem occurring in their community or an initiative that could be pursued, as well as a concrete and detailed description of a possible solution. Gamification elements have been included in TAB Sharing to foster participation. This makes the use of the application continuous over time and supports decision-making through the content exchanged. A user study with 20 citizens of two Italian municipalities has been carried out to compare a version of TAB Sharing without gamification and the one with gamification; the results of the study reported in the paper show the added value brought by gamification elements in the e-participation domain.