Citizen Participation in the Management of Territorial Information

For the formulation of public policies, it is indispensable that citizen participation promotes deliberation and decision-making in the management of public affairs and in particular in the processes of territorial planning. To understand the problem of territorial information management it is necessary to work on knowledge management and content management, because participation is not merely informative or consultative, it requires that citizens have the right to give their opinions, propose, and decide on what affects them in their daily lives. In the canton of Cuenca, citizen participation has been weak, among other aspects, because of the quality of information available to the actors involved in the participatory process, due to the scarcity of tools and methods that allow the incorporation of new alternatives of information and communication technologies. This article analyzes the quality of information available to citizens in the process of formulating territorial plans and the inclusion of virtual assistants as a useful tool to support citizen participation processes by generating data sources that are easy to obtain and that, by having a more personalized interface, facilitate their use, in order to make geoinformation transparent and democratize it as an input for territorial planning.