Invitation to participate in an action research software development study

An action research-based framework for practitioner-led software design has been conceived to create a tool to support participation in the 1000 cities challenge. Action research is a qualitative research method founded on strong ethical and moral principles concerning the delivery of tangible results from participant-led research which addresses real world problems (Stringer, 2021).

Stakeholders in the fields of urban planning and policy research and practice who share an interest in the project goals are invited to participate as co-researchers in the planning, design and evaluation of the software implementation through to the formal release of the open source software.

Why participate?

An increasing majority of the world’s population reside in cities, however inequities of health, wealth and opportunities exacerbated by how we design and manage cities pose challenges not only for individual and population health and wellbeing, but also planetary sustainability.

An international collaborative group of built environment and physical activity researchers, the Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators Collaboration, seek to develop a tool to support evaluation and monitoring of policy and spatial indicators to support interventions promoting healthy, sustainable cities in diverse contexts globally. Following an initial scoping project for 25 cities (https://www.healthysustainablecities.org/publications), a ‘1000 city challenge’ has been proposed (https://www.healthysustainablecities.org/1000cities).

Feedback gathered from potential users of the software will help guide the design of an open source tool to meet the needs of urban planning and health stakeholders who seek to benchmark and monitor plicy and spatial indicators for healthy and sustainable cities in diverse settings.

What does it involve?

Stakeholder participants will complete a short survey (linked below) and be engaged through optional monthly online focus group sessions and on-going opportunities for feedback via e-mail or GitHub in progressing the project through three key project phases: 1) Clarifying goals and elicitation of user requirements; 2) modelling a comprehensible and sustainable software architecture that meets the needs of domain experts; 3) on-going evaluation of prototype software, as stakeholder feature requests are progressively implemented according to consensus on user priorities. This will be achieved through iteration through cycles of observation, evaluation and implementation (or ‘Look-Think-Act’ (Stringer, 2021)) through to final delivery of the research objectives, as represented in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Software development envisaged through the framework of participatory action research

The study is anticipated to span 4 months from March 2022 to July 2023, although this may be extended as the criteria for successful realisation of working software for a formal release will be determined through the collaborative action research process.

No prior knowledge of software development is required of participants, whose engagement is predicated on interest and expertise in the intersection of urban planning, health and sustainability and the monitoring and evaluation of policy and spatial indicators to support these goals in specific local contexts. Participants with an interest in active contribution to coding may do so using the public facing GitHub project page which will be used for development. Community facing project contribution guidelines will be developed as part of the action research process.

To understand user cohort diversity, basic demographic data will be collected and summarised (e.g. age, sex, professional field(s), years of engagement in professional field(s), qualifications, city and primary languages of practice, prior engagement in the Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators Collaboration). This information will be used to contextualise aggregate feedback in a way that is respectful and professional, and with consent from participants. Participants will have the opportunity to review and clarify any records produced through the project to ensure their feedback and engagement with the project is accurately and fairly represented.

The research is not interested in sensitive or personal details, however participants can request anonymity in records and summaries produced through the course of the research; a random generated identifier will be used in such cases, with identity linkage securely stored.

What will the research outputs be?

The primary output is an open source software package (creative work/tool), which will be hosted and maintained on GitHub and RMIT Figshare. A journal article detailing the development process and usage of the software will be published in a Q1 journal, and presented on in at least one conference. Participants who have actively participated as co-researchers will be invited to be included as co-authors, as per the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Additional journal articles presenting both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses conducted using the software for the 1000 city challenge are envisaged as long term outcomes. The outputs arising from the usage of the software will include data, figures and PDF policy reports in multiple languages with broad scope for impact on policy and practice in city planning. The software is envisaged to encourage and facilitate the public dissemination of such research outputs, for example, through streamlining the process of archival in public repositories and indexing with persistent DOI identifiers.

Study details

Human research ethics approval to conduct an action research study was granted on 5 September 2022 by the RMIT University Design and Social Context (DSC) College Human Advisory Network (CHEAN). The project (#25552) was considered to be negligible/low risk, with an anticipated end date of 1 August 2024.

This research project is being conducted by Carl Higgs (PhD Candidate), Emeritus Professor Billie Giles-Corti, Dr Dhirendra Singh, Dr Sebastian Rodriguez and Dr Melanie Lowe.

For further information about the research and its outcomes please contact carl.higgs@rmit.edu.au. Should you have any concerns or questions about this research project, which you do not wish to discuss with the researchers listed in this document, then you may contact humanethics@rmit.edu.au.

Complete the survey and participate in the study

To participate, we ask that a short (5-10 minutes) baseline survey be completed, with optional further participation in feedback groups.

The Google Forms survey can be accessed here.

Thank you for your interest in participating in our research!

References

Stringer ET, Aragón AO (2021) Action Research, 5th ed. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Evans E (2003) Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Addison-Wesley

Farley D (2022) Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster. Pearson

Liu S, Higgs C, Arundel J, Boeing G, Cerdera N, Moctezuma D, Cerin E, Adlakha D, Lowe M, Giles-Corti B (2021) A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data. Geographical Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12290

Higgs C, Alderton A, Rozek J, et al (2022) Policy-Relevant Spatial Indicators of Urban Liveability And Sustainability: Scaling From Local to Global. Urban Policy and Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/08111146.2022.2076215