Cloud platform Bahrain parks: Real-time participatory tool for planning, designing, and managing public parks

The paper introduces an innovative, open source cloud platform for the efficient, knowledge-based, sustainable and inclusive development of urban parks — Bahrain Parks, developed at the University of Bahrain. We describe the local context at the genesis of the initiative, its components, and the rationale for the creation of a comprehensive database. We summarise the data available and explain how the application leverages it to useful information for decision-making on park maintenance, planning, and design. We share our initial findings regarding the official acceptance and attempts to integrate the application in workflows at several agencies. To our knowledge, the project is unique as it is being developed to incorporate an evidence-based design process, comprehensively. Furthermore, it embeds explicit and implicit public participation in decision-making, through park rating and usage. We argue that the project belongs to the sphere of e-governance.