Developing Knowledge-Based Citizen Participation Platform to Support Smart City Decision Making: The Smarticipate Case Study

Abstract

Citizen participation for social innovation and co-creating urban regeneration proposals can be greatly facilitated by innovative IT systems. Such systems can use Open Government Data, visualise urban proposals in 3D models and provide automated feedback on the feasibility of the proposals. Using such a system as a communication platform between citizens and city administrations provides an integrated top-down and bottom-up urban planning and decision-making approach to smart cities. However, generating automated feedback on citizens' proposals requires modelling domain-specific knowledge i.e., vocabulary and rules, which can be applied on spatial and temporal 3D models. This paper presents the European Commission funded H2020 smarticipate project that aims to achieve the above challenge by applying it on three smart cities: Hamburg, Rome and RBKC-London. Whilst the proposed system architecture indicates various innovative features, a proof of concept of the automated feedback feature for the Hamburg use case 'planting trees' is demonstrated. Early results and lessons learned show that it is feasible to provide automated feedback on citizen-initiated proposals on specific topics. However, it is not straightforward to generalise this feature to cover more complex concepts and conditions which require specifying comprehensive domain languages, rules and appropriate tools to process them. This paper also highlights the strengths of the smarticipate platform, discusses challenges to realise its different features and suggests potential solutions.

Beyond Open Data Hackathons: Exploring Digital Innovation Success

“…Open data hackathons or innovation contests are events where individuals from different fields cooperate to develop applications that will offer value to citizens establishing a win-win situation for all involved bodies. Unfortunately, many applications that have been developed in hackathons are abandoned, leading them to only provide open data access, which is not enough to increase economic value [22][23][24]. Despite the significance of hackathons, previous researchers have not widely studied the motivations of developers and the challenges of open data hackathons, and limited studies have focused on the preparation and evaluation of these contests [25][26][27][28][29].…”

Smart city big data analytics: An advanced review

“…It requires stakeholder engagement for increased public‐private partnerships; citizen participation in planning for co‐designing cities; data collection from built‐environment, public agencies such as health, mobility, environment, security and socio‐economic activities for analysis and decision making. In this respect, smart governance uses ICT tools for data collection, processing and analysis in order to better understand the state of city, improve communication, enhance public service provisioning and promote transparency by introducing evidence‐based policies (Javed, Khan, & McClatchey, ; Khan et al, ). Since the focus on this survey paper is data analysis, we will only cover data and technology related aspects.…”

Blockchain and edge computing–based architecture for participatory smart city applications

“…Such a smart open governance approach aims to engage with citizens through innovative approaches and deliver highly transparent and trustable public services . The involvement of citizen in city planning through consultation meetings, opinions, polls, and call‐for‐comments on online proposals is referred as citizen engagement or participation, eg, smarticipate project . This enables city administrators to get to know actual needs of the local community, co‐create and transform the city infrastructure and services around citizens' needs and requirements.…”

“…Citizen participation opens significant research challenges like trust, transparency, auditability, traceability, security, and privacy of citizen data and its management are mostly ignored by most of the existing work . Those who do only provide mundane solutions by either tapping into existing social interaction platform tailored for limited citizen involvement, eg, voting and comments, or building citizen involvement services, which cater for special need, eg, initiate new proposals and exchange ideas …”