Smart Governance: Opportunities for technologically-mediated citizen co-production

Citizens increasingly contribute directly to the evolution of sustainable cities, in particular where new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise to transform urban governance into ‘Smart city governance’ and where ICTs are integrated in strategies for citizen participation and the co-production of public services and policy. This article provides a multi-disciplinary understanding of Smart city governance, including new insights around the opportunities for citizen engagement in the co-production of service-delivery and decision-making. Using findings from a review of Smart cities literature and practice, the article aims to establish the breadth of Smart city initiatives which emphasise citizen participation and the realities of delivering such initiatives in complex city environments. Emphasising the emerging role of the technologically ‘empowered’ citizen, a new conceptual model is presented, where mutual trust, shared understanding and new opportunities for co-production emerge in an environment mediated by new technology – this form of Smart governance is referred to here as ‘technologically-mediated municipal reciprocity’

Free Ride in Rush-hour Traffic – Designing Gamified Smart Mobility Systems for Sustainable Use

A large proportion of traffic congestion can be attributed to daily commute. While smart mobility systems (SMSs) intend to address the resulting challenges by actively changing users’ behavior, many SMSs suffer from users’ meaningful engagement. Research and practice have started examining engagement factors in order to increase meaningful engagement with SMSs. The question of how traffic participants can be continuously involved with SMSs to sustainably change their behavior has not been answered satisfactorily yet. In our paper, we identify relevant gamification elements suitable to improve meaningful engagement based on a literature study and market analysis. We used a design science approach to derive design requirements. Building on these, we assume comprehensive design principles and used them to derive initial design features. With these, we started a first feature configuration and a prototypical app implementation towards designing a sustainable SMS

Enhance User Engagement using Gamified Ineternet of Things

Gamification is considered as a promising approach to enhance people’s engagement in many social or technical systems, thus is supposed to play an important role in future Internet of Everything (IoE). Although gamification elements have already been reported in various IoT research, there still lacks answers about how gamification may affect user engagement in IoT systems and through what paths. In present work, we are synthesizing and analyzing existing research efforts in these emerging fields to provide implications for future IoE development. The results are categorized into three dimensions by considering cognitive-behavioral outcome, procedural stage and population scale

Towards IS-enabled Sustainable Communities – A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

The trend of urbanization leads to several environmental problems such as shortage of resource, pollution, and rising carbon emissions. In the smart city context sustainable communities are considered as promising measures to tackle these issues. The technological evolution of the recent years offers versatile opportunities to convince people in their behavior and the potential of information systems to support ecological improvements gains increasing importance and interest in research. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for the design of citizen-centric environmental sustainable information systems to build sustainable communities in smart cities. The framework considers theories and counter measures from psychological, social, environmental, and IS science to create a holistic architecture for green IS implementations. The goal is to drive further research and practical implementations in this domain

Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design activities are somewhat limited. In this paper, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a smart city project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising participatory design at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city

Citizen engagement through city apps: Technology adoption approach

Metropolitan areas are constantly evolving, and the smart city concept is gaining traction throughout local governance. The new paradigm for cities lands on an organic, efficient and interconnected structure, where the citizen is placed at the centre. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are the main technological enablers for this change and for citizen engagement, city services and applications (Apps) as one of the channels possible to use. The main objective of the present study is to find the key determinants that enable the adoption of city mobile apps. A theoretical model was created, and an online survey conducted to gather insights of the citizens' perspectives regarding the city apps. The results indicate the model is valid and that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are important components to the adoption of city apps. In addition, it was possible to identify some organizational and individual impacts recurring from the use of these apps. This study contributes to a new model of city apps adoption and provides evidence to organisms involved on the implementation and development of these apps.As áreas metropolitanas estão em constante desenvolvimento e o conceito de smart cities tem vindo a ganhar força entre organismos de governação local. Este novo paradigma para as cidades assenta numa estrutura orgânica, interconectada e eficiente, onde o cidadão é colocado no centro. As tecnologias de comunicação e informação são consideradas os principais facilitadores para esta mudança e envolvimento do cidadão, sendo os serviços e aplicações (apps) disponíveis um dos canais utilizados. O objectivo principal do presente estudo é determinar o que proporciona adopção de apps citadinas. Um modelo teórico foi desenhado e um questionário online realizado, de modo a recolher as percepções dos cidadãos, relativamente ao uso destas aplicações mobile. Os resultados indicam que o modelo é válido e que a percepção de utilidade e de facilidade de utilização são importantes componentes na adopção de apps citadinas. Adicionalmente, foi possível identificar algum impacto individual e organizacional promovido pelo uso destas apps. Este estudo vem contribuir para um novo modelo de adopção a apps citadinas e facilitar informação aos organismos envolvidos no desenvolvimento e implementação das mesmas

Gamification: Stimulating User Smart City Application

The urban problems have led to an increase in the population in urban areas considering the needs of many government employees to provide service to all citizens. However, in actual conditions, government employees are limited, therefore, need community empowerment involved to support government management of the city. The solution for community empowerment is using communication technology as a public space for the citizens to communicate with the government. Citizen participation used smart city application ass public space to inform the sentiment public to the government. Citizens have adapted from traditional public play to public technological space. Gamification on smart city application devices motivates citizens, which has a growing influence on reporting and complaint activity. Technology set up gamification to create active citizens by reporting complaints of city infrastructure. Results identified gamification encourage a lot of citizen participation in reporting sentiment and complaint inside smart city applications

Gamification of E-Participation: A Literature Review

Gamification is one of the most commonly employed approaches for motivating individuals to participate in several types of activities. One of its largest application areas has been e-participation (i.e. citizen engagement in policy-making). Even though the required ICT infrastructure to facilitate e- participation mostly exists today, the focus of the problem has shifted towards humans; citizens are not motivated enough to participate. Gamification is a potential approach to increase motivation towards e- participation. However, currently there is a dearth in our understanding of how gamification is being applied and researched as well as what kinds of result there exist from gamification. The aim of this paper is to synthesize research and findings on gamified e-participation, providing directions for future research in this area

A GAMIFICATION FRAMEWORK FOR CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND SUSTAINABLE WATER USAGE PROMOTION

The recent advent of smart meters to increase the effectiveness of urban Water Demand Management Strategies (WDM) has allowed water utilities to gather quasi real-time consumption data to monitor the network status and load and useful to develop models of consumers' behavior. At the same time, the consumption information can warn users about their habits in a fine-grained way. In principle, the feedback alone could stimulate increased awareness on water usage, but the motivations and individual attitudes of consumers are mostly hidden. Moreover, the same sustainable behavior should be incentivized also for households in which smart metering solutions are not present, but for which data gathering becomes a challenge. Modifying users' behavior by means of software is a tough task, due to the difficulty in designing an effective application able to maintain the behavioral changes in the long term. Gamification, the use of game design techniques and game mechanics to enhance traditional applications and drive behaviors of its users, has been proven successful in tackling with the problem. In this work, we propose a gamified application to enhance users' participation and data gathering in a real WDM scenario, by describing the designing principles and the architecture of the envisioned solution. An integrated approach exploiting both board and digital games to incentivize users to submit meaningful data for water utilities and change their long-term behavior is also detailed. The work is part of the SmartH2O project, which aims at creating an ICT platform to raise customers' awareness about their consumption and pursue water savings in the residential sector