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Citizen engagement figures prominently on political agendas around the world. In this context, high hopes are pinned to open government, open data and ICT tools. At the same time, there are fears of a widening digital divide, where large groups of society are in danger of being excluded from societal processes, for example due to having difficulties in using the online tools provided. In this paper, we propose an approach that has the potential to address many key issues in this context (e.g. accessibility, complexity, engagement). It relies on space and time as common integrators, and uses interactive augmented geo-visualizations to facilitate citizen engagement. We report on key challenges that need to be overcome to realize this approach and on initial progress towards this goal. We describe a set of prototypical tools aimed at supporting citizen engagement in the envisioned way, and discuss the approach as well as its potentials, issues and challenges in detail. Initial experiences and results indicate that our approach is not only technically feasible but it can also empower citizens to more effectively engage with societal and governmental processes.

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Real-time synchronization is increasingly available in webbased environments for editing textual data, and this has changed how groups of people collaborate. We present a novel approach for real-time collaborative editing of geo-data. We introduce Ethermap, an open source webapplication that implements this approach and enables multiple users to map data concurrently. It supports synchronous and collaborative mapping in several ways: it visually highlights mapping activities, it allows for fine-grained reviewing of all changes, and it enhances text-based communication with cross-modal references to geo-objects.We report on key results from a multi-tiered evaluation of Ethermap based on a user-study and on expert interviews. The concept of real-time collaborative editing was received favorably by users and experts. Participants of the study learned to use Ethermap quickly, and successfully completed a collaborative mapping task. Experts and users agreed that, given the right scenario (e.g., disaster mapping, teaching, planning), the approach could benefit the process of working on geo-data collaboratively.