The goal was to learn about backgrounds, approaches and methods in citizen participation in order to deepen the competence of the SPES consultants in this regard. The background and contextual knowledge in the development of successful citizen community models and multifunctional local supply centers must be precisely known by our project developers for their participation work in the communities. Based on a knowledge base, they should learn the HOW for the emergence and promotion of citizen communities in order to be competent in the design of participation processes. To implement the participation steps in communities, citizens must learn how to implement their solutions. This requires intensive training and consulting work for local councils, political leaders, elected officials and the active citizenry. An active citizenry should become familiar with democratic political processes in order to enable realistic change processes in the communities. A further goal was to actually apply what had been learned in 2 Austrian pilot communities. SPES GmbH was to use the project to expand its consulting competence to include the areas of multifunctional local supply and active citizenship/citizen communities.
In Austria, there are more and more municipalities that want to work on the topic of civic engagement and strive for concrete solutions for the provision of public services in rural areas. There are many citizen participation approaches and methods to activate citizens, but there is often a lack of implementation of citizen participation projects, so that citizen participation often ends with the collection of wishes and needs and is not consistently also worked on the joint implementation. The model examples from Germany should show and teach the implementation variants for Austrian municipalities and especially for SPES staff and members in the SPES association.