Towards a Service Platform and Business Model for Mobile Participation

Abstract

In an attempt to bring citizens closer to governments, electronic participation services are increasingly receiving attention. Despite technological advances regarding smartphones and georeferencing, mobile extensions to eparticipation solutions are lacking. We propose a generic service platform called mGeoWiki, which will provide a mobile interface for several participation services. Within this paper, we describe the first stages of the design research cycle, describing the problem and an initial proposed solution. We explicitly design the service concept simultaneously with the underlying business model in order to enhance the chances of eventual market success. Besides the instantiated service platform and business model, we contribute to literature by generating knowledge on how to design service platforms and business models simultaneously. Follow-up research will be conducted in a large, multi-university, international research project focusing on design and evaluation of the service platform and business model.

Exploring the Motives of Citizen Reporting Engagement: Self-Concern and Other-Orientation

“…The goal for governments behind citizen sourcing, in turn, is to co-produce knowledge with citizens. The term is often used synonymously with eParticipation or mobile participation (de Reuver et al 2013). The co-production perspective differs from the perspective of New Public Management, where citizens are treated as customers (Bryson et al 2014).…”

“…Such reporting applications allow citizens to efficiently share knowledge that is relevant to governmental services via a web-based or mobile platform by means of information and communications technology (ICT). They are predominantly used to report infrastructure issues at certain locations using geolocation technology (de Reuver et al 2013). Thus, in the context of smart cities, citizen reporting is of special interest because local governments require a multitude of data sources to enhance or expand their services in ''smart'' ways.…”

“…However, while many of the publications on citizen reporting focus on classifying and structuring the concept as such (e.g., Linders 2012; Nam 2012) or on how the respective applications should ideally be designed (e.g., de Reuver et al 2013;Lönn et al 2016), to date, little is known about what motivates citizens to voluntarily engage in citizen reporting activities. In particular, with a few exceptions such as the study by Wijnhoven et al (2015), there is a lack of empirical studies looking at what drives platform users to devote time and resources to support governments by means of their reporting.…”

mGovernment Services and Adoption: Current Research and Future Direction

“…Some of these studies tend to overlap with factors affecting design and implementation, e.g. design issues for m-participation [26]. However, researchers found less interested to focus on m-government adoption study.…”

Mobile Platforms and Ecosystems

“…Eaton et al (2015) develop this further by showing platform innovation as distributed process of boundary resource tuning. Tilson et al (2012) compare the innovation dynamics of several mobile app platforms and de Reuver et al (2010) explore possible roles of mobile platforms as catalysts for citizen participation. Basole and colleagues (Basole, 2009;Basole and Karla, 2011;Basole et al, 2015) analyse and visualise the mobile ecosystem.…”