SCC-RCN: Smart Civic Engagement in Rapidly Urbanizing Regions

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Solutions for large-scale problems like stormwater management in urbanizing regions require input from a variety of stakeholders and coordination between nearby cities and towns. However, institutional barriers commonly prevent open discussion for collaborative decision-making. The team envisions a new way to enhance smart connections among communities and break down barriers across geographic space, levels of governance, and types of expertise: a collaborative platform for knowledge-sharing that suits diverse stakeholder needs, a mutually developed environment called TomorrowNow. This Research Collaboration Network (RCN) will unite regional stakeholders from government, industry, academia, watershed associations, and other community groups to guide the development of TomorrowNow, advancing the contribution of diverse perspectives to stormwater management and decision-making. The publicly available, multi-userenvironment conceptualized by the RCN will be transformative for crowdsourcing the opinions of a wide range of stakeholders and local residents in the Triangle region of North Carolina. Residents will be able to explore and visualize intervention strategies in the very places where they live and work, to inform management decisions regarding stormwater and improve quality of life. Ultimately, the online game conceptualized by the RCN will not only provide an engaging, intuitive platform in the Triangle, but will serve as a model to empower smart and connected communities elsewhere.This RCN will collaboratively explore whether multi-user, web-based collaborative decision making using real data and scientific models to show the connectedness of locations could increase equitable participation in local decision-making, elevating the voices of underprivileged groups and diverse perspectives. The RCN will unite researchers and stakeholders to plan the design of a collaborative decision environment, TomorrowNow, which enables people to interact with spatially explicit models of urbanization and associated changes to stormwater hydrology (quantity) and biogeochemistry (quality), problems of increasing concern across urbanizing regions in the US. The RCN will convene leaders from local and regional governments, non-governmental organizations, and research teams specializing in natural, social, and computer sciences in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina; these leaders will collaboratively identify needs and approaches for improving inclusive participation and allowing a wider range of stakeholders to explore and visualize intervention strategies in the places where they live and work. Development of the network will advance the science of co-producing actionable solutions among researchers, policymakers, and residents, as well as identify research directions that advance new genres of urbanization and stormwater models (hydrologic and biogeochemical) needed to underlie the user-friendly interface of a serious game. TomorrowNow will enable communities connected by shared water networks (and their associated problems of stormwater runoff, surface water contamination, and groundwater quantity/quality) to collaboratively design alternative futures that optimize management of those water networks. The input of diverse communities will be collected via surveys, semi-structured interviews, panels, discussions during in-person workshops and symposia, and through discussion threads in an open-source online community.