As part of the project "Civitas Digitalis", which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and supervised by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe(PTKA), the transfer conference "Civitas Digitalis - Digital and Crowd-based Service Systems for the Creation of Sustainable and Livable Living Spaces 2020" took place in Hamburg on November 21, 2019. The Department of Information Systems(Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister) of the University of Kassel was represented by Matthias Billert (research associate in the Civitas Digitalis project) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Peters (research group leader University of Kassel and assistant professor at the University of St. Gallen).  
With a content focus on digital co-creation and artificial intelligence in citizen participation, the conference was aimed at stakeholders in local government, service providers, IT companies and academics who are active in the areas of participation/citizen involvement and also address digitization issues in this context. More than 60 participants took up the offer and entered into a comprehensive exchange of knowledge together with the other project partners University of Hamburg, City of Hamburg, fortiss GmbH and the City of Kassel. 

After a welcome from the hosts by Susanne  Metz (Office for Regional Planning and Urban Development Hamburg), a greeting from Dr.-Ing. Michael Große (Project Management Agency Karlsruhe PTKA) and from Prof. Dr. Eva  Bittner (University of Hamburg/Coordinator of the joint project) followed. Subsequently, two keynotes on the topic of "Trends in Citizen Participation" by Mr. Jörg Sommer (Berlin Institute for Participation) and Mr. Rolf  Lührs (DEMOS E-Participation GmbH) provided exciting impulses.

Subsequently, the three-year project insights of Civitas Digitalis were presented in three short presentations. The start was made by Peggy  Niering (City of Kassel) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Peters with "Wake up the Hercules in you"(https://weckdenherkulesindir.de). This was followed by a presentation by Daniel Kulus(Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Eva  Bittner (University of Hamburg/project management) on the topic of innovation kits. Peter Kuhn (fortiss GmbH, An-Institut TU München) concluded the presentation on the technical implementation of the Civitas Digitalis platform. 

An exciting exchange and especially cross-project insights could be gained through the workshop - Digital Participation with Christina Hartmann (City of Kassel) and Matthias Billert (University of Kassel) by developing solutions to overcome existing challenges of digital forms of participation in the public sector.

A final discussion of the results took place in an intensive panel discussion with Prof. Dr. Eva  Bittner (University of Hamburg), Jörg Sommer (Berlin Institute for Participation), Rolf  Lührs (DEMOS E-Participation GmbH) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Peters moderated by Mr. Claudius Lieven (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg).  

The documentation incl. videos of the panel discussion will be made available on the website of the project http://civitas-digitalis.de/ !