Quality of Citizen Reporting Tools at Municipal Level

Abstract

Quality of life in cities is highly dependent on the state of public infrastructure. Maintenance of the infrastructure is managed by the local government that needs to be informed about issues on the infrastructure. Although the duty of maintenance staff is to check the state of the infrastructure, it is difficult to know about all the problems in the city. Therefore, citizens can take the initiative and participate by reporting any issue on public infrastructure. Today, citizens have many options on how to report such issues, due to modern communication technologies. Citizen reporting systems, which are a special type of participatory technology, deserve deeper research due to its novelty in the information system research. In this article, we introduce the study of 13 Czech regional capitals and their reporting systems. In this study, we evaluate the existence of different types of communication channels (phone, e-mail, electronic form, WebGis, and mobile application) and their quality based on four criteria (searchability, coverage of issues, visual geolocation, and display of sent reports). Moreover, the results of regional capitals will be compared with previous research on cities in these regions.

Access Under Duress

“…Critical to these and other projects seeking to develop tools for public life is consideration for the forms of democracy adopted or implicit in the design [75]. Mariam Asad argues much of HCI scholarship on civic engagement defaults into liberal democratic principles of deliberative and representative democracy [2], with many computing interventions and tools designed to scale participation towards a voting paradigm [42], increase access to representatives [53,57], monitor and relate to urban infrastructure [41,55], and perform different forms of crowdsourcing and citizen science [30]. Similarly, Carl DiSalvo's critique of deliberative democratic assumptions of shared rational decision-making introduces a design theory that embraces a cycle of contestation -or, agonism -through the lens of adversarial design [16].…”

Crowdsourced data to improve municipalities governance: Sesimbra’s case : Defining, reporting, and analyzing KPI’s for citizen reported occurrences

“…Using information and ICT-based technology to address public issues can be the gateway to improving the quality of life within cities (Khatoun & Zeadally, 2016). Technology can drive the improvement for cities by finding opportunities that answer old problems (Kopackova & Libalova, 2019), for instance by generating high volumes of data that can ultimately guide smarter government strategies (Datta & Odendaal, 2019;Bibri & Krogstie, 2017).…”

“…Looking inward towards the current project scope several of these six-dimensions play a major role in its development, especially when considering Citizens as the focus for a sustainable development, as for instance the Smart Governance dimension. The concept of Smart Governance relates to, as motioned by Kopackova & Libalova (2019), the intent of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the management of the governance within cities, that could be attained by focusing on the citizen's needs. Additionally, the occurrence category axes that citizens can report within the Application of "Nós Sesimbra" correlate to all this dimensions and to the subsequent decision making from the municipality parties., i.e., "Green spaces" connected to the smart environment dimension or "traffic lights" connected to smart mobility.…”

“…Studies argue that the implemented strategies, by these cities, did not focus on solving urban challenges on the past (Saunders & Baeck, 2015). Moreover, traditional approaches have invested immensely on IOT hardware solutions -street sensors; smart buildings; smart bins -, rather than trying to focus on human capital (Caragliu et al, 2011;Kopackova & Libalova, 2019). The major problem with the old approaches' emphasis on the fact that, despite of citizens being the direct beneficiaries of Smart Cities projects, they tend not to be consulted regarding their real necessities (Saunders & Baeck, 2015).…”

Zurich Like New

“…Local governments have natural bounds in terms of budget and maintenance staff to detect all types of issues occurring in cities. Fortunately, such problems can be reported by people directly to the proper city office [11]. Furthermore, local communities tend to know their urban environments well [15].…”