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Smart cities research evolved into one of the most vibrant fields of research and policy-making with sustainability and well-being becoming the bons mots of the debate. The business sector, i.e., the developers and the vendors, form an equally important group of stakeholders in this context. The question is to what extent that debate yields the kind of output that the end-users would expect and would consider useful and usable. A plethora of smart city services exists. Literature suggests that a myriad of new ICT-enhanced tools could find application in urban space. Methodologically speaking, the question is how to link these two meaningfully. The objective of this paper is to address this issue. To this end, smart city services are mapped and clusters of services are identified; end users’ perceptions and expectations are identified and observations are drawn. The value added of this paper is threefold: (i) at the conceptual level, it adds new insights in the ‘normative bias of smart cities research’ thesis, (ii) at the empirical level, it typifies smart city services and clusters them, and (iii) it introduces a practical toolkit that policymakers, regulators, and the business sector might employ to query end-users’ perceptions and expectations to effectively respond to citizens’ needs.

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Social networks research has grown exponentially over the past decade. Subsequent empirical and conceptual advances have been transposed in the field of education. As the debate on delivering better education for all gains momentum, the big question is how to integrate advances in social networks research, corresponding advances in information and communication technology (ICT) and effectively employ them in the domain of education. To address this question, this paper proposes a conceptual framework (maturity model) that integrates social network research, the debate on technology-enhanced learning (TEL) and the emerging concept of smart education.

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