00:01Ladies and gentlemen, I present you...to you some lessons learned from GeoDesign application, and...

00:11Oh, what is that? Ah. This is the...doesn't matter.

00:20This is the wrong presentation, but...There...there must be another one. Doesn’t matter.

00:28It's, it's...It will do. It's...

00:31[Inaudible audience participation]

00:32No, no. It’s...it's only the wrong version; it will do. Now...

00:38Our starting point was that we developed two landscape...GIS-based landscape planning support systems...

00:47... in order to improve public participation and environmentally informed decision making, and we developed these systems on two...for two...

00:59...different decision levels, for the municipality level and for the farm scale.

01:06We also evaluated the effect of these systems on the addressees.

01:12Now, in order... Diane might interrupt me afterwards, I will give you the essence of my...of my talk now, already.

01:22The eh...the most...or the most distinct effect of fusing such information systems, or GeoDesign systems, was that the transparency of the decision making ...

01:37...about environmental issues was enhanced very much, and this had political as well as economic relevance in the process...

01:46...and people liked it or they disliked it, also.

01:51Now, my first example is the interactive landscape plan which we designed for the City of Koenigslutter in Germany, and...

02:00...it is kind of toolbox, with many modules, and I will present you...only the lessons we...or some lessons draw...we draw from testing...

02:09...different visualization tools in participation situations.

02:16Now, the lessons we drew from that is that pictures are very powerful tools in a transparent participation process.

02:30On the other hand, it is very important that you pick the right visualization tool for... in different planning stages, and also for...

02:41...different planning objectives or planning purposes.

02:45In some situations, the...or a simple sketch may be more ful...powerful and more suitable to the situation than...

02:54...a sophisticated VRML visualization.

02:58Also, it...it turned out that usually you need more than one visualization tool, and a map usually is essential for every process...

03:08...because people need to orientate.

03:14We also developed a map-based online participation tool, and the lessons we learned in testing and in using this tool was that...

03:25...it enhanced the quality of the commands made by stakeholders and citizens very much, because they had to really precisely...

03:35...put down, and also are a concrete, to put down their proposals or their commands.

03:44And another effect was the enhanced transparency of the whole political decision-making process, because you could...

03:53...trace the kind of history or the way of every command of every citizen and its impact on political decision making.

04:02Now, this was welcomed very much by NGOs, for instance, and also by the administration of the city council, because it...

04:11...facilitated their processing of commands and their whole work.

04:16Also, farmers liked it, in this stage, in the planning stage of inventory, because they could make very concrete...

04:23...commands to the inventory and change things.

04:26However, some politicians didn’t like this high transparency, and in some following cases, even, it happened that political bodies...

04:37...did not allow the administration to use this system. I leave it to your imagination what that means, but we...

04:44...took it as a compliment. Oops.

04:56Now, as to farmers.

04:59We developed a farm support management system, and the...the...the...the lessons we learned in using this system on...

05:12...farms was that the...the acceptance or the...whether farmers welcomed the system depended very much on whether there we...

05:25...were enough incentives for them to use it.

05:29There were, of course, individuals who were intrinsically motivated to use such a system.

05:34But most of the farmers needed incentives, and such incentives would be, for instance, that the environmental administration...

05:43...would tie paying environmental...would tie pay...payments for environmental measures or services, which the farmers could...

05:56...support, to such transparency and to using such a system.

06:01Also, food companies would motivate some farmers...some of their producers to use this system, and recently we started to work together...

06:12...with a brewer of organic lemonade who wants to kind of, yeah, enhance trust in the company...

06:21... and wants to improve the image of the company and he wants his prod...or he wants the consumers be able to trace over the 'Net, the producing...

06:31...of the ingredients of the lemonade.

06:34So where there's...that shows, both these examples show that such transparency has also economic relevance, and will make, for instance,...

06:45...agrienvironmental measures more efficient and the spending of public money more efficient.

06:51Now, my takeaway message is that the transparency can...created by such GeoDesign applications may be inconvenient...

07:00...for some people, but on the other...sometimes all...also for us.

07:05But on the other hand, it may be our most powerful ally in implementing environmental objectives.

07:14Thank you.