The use of Communities of Practice to Involve Stakeholders in the Decision Support System Design

The BRIDGE project aimed to combine scientific models and data from different environmental and socio-economic domains into one integrated Decision Support System(DSS) for sustainable urban planning. The BRIDGE DSS also enabled the incorporation o fstakeholder perceptions on the relative importance of the various domains. The purpose of the DSS was to provide useful and timely information to planners and decision-makers on the potential effects of urban planning and development options. Therefore, and in order to ensure the usability of the BRIDGE DSS,end-users had to be involved in the project in a structural way. On-going dialogue between urban planners, DSS programmers, atmospheric modellers, hydrologists and other technical specialists was thus critical to define the design and outputs of the DSS.