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Governments and public institutions increasingly embrace digital opportunities to involve citizens in public issues and decision making. While public participation is generally seen as an important and promising venture, the design of the participation processes and the utilized digital infrastructure poses challenges, especially to the public sector. Instead of limiting conceptual guidance and exchange to one domain, we therefore develop a taxonomy for digital involvement projects that unites the domains of eparticipation, citizen science and crowd-X. Embedded in a design science research approach, we follow an iterative design process to elaborate the key characteristics of a digital involvement project based on the participation process, its individuals and digital infrastructure. Through evaluating the artifact in a focus group with domain practitioners, we find support for the usefulness of our taxonomy and its ability to provide guidance and a basis for discussion of digital involvement projects across domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The upswing of projects, conducting citizen science (CS) by means of ICT has resulted in the development of numerous digital participation platforms. Recently platformization as a trend away from individual project platforms towards the domination of larger platforms enabling the support of generic citizen science initiatives could be observed. Through their design and functionality these multi-project platforms thus influence the way research initiatives can be conducted in a participatory manner. By performing a structured artifact review of multi-project citizen science platforms on the market, we provide clarity towards the question, which multi-project platforms exist and how they support research projects. The review identified 16 platforms, that assist the conduction of generic citizen science projects. Demonstrating significant differences in functionality and features of the investigated platforms, the review underlines that the choice of multi-project CS platform presents a key decision for project initiators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]