Social Media and the Public Sector

{Excerpt} Social media is revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work, and play. Elements of the private sector have begun to thrive on opportunities to forge, build, and deepen relationships. Some are transforming their organizational structures and opening their corporate ecosystems in consequence. The public sector is a relative newcomer. It too can drive stakeholder involvement and satisfaction. Global conversations, especially among Generation Y, were born circa 2004. Beginning 1995 until then, the internet had hosted static, one-way websites. These were places to visit passively, retrieve information from, and perhaps post comments about by electronic mail. Sixteen years later, Web 2.0 enables many-to-many connections in numerous domains of interest and practice, powered by the increasing use of blogs, image and video sharing, mashups, podcasts, ratings, Really Simple Syndication, social bookmarking, tweets, widgets, and wikis, among others. Today, people expect the internet to be user-centric

A Systematic Literature Review on Smart City Project Initiatives for Rural Community Participation

Most democratic governments have prioritised offering people more significant input in government decision-making and promoting public participation in policy creation. People and governments may now effectively integrate formerly unsurmountable gaps in their relationships thanks to advances in digital and information technologies. "Smart City" technologies are not a new term in today's urbanisation development field; however, this "Smart City" technologies term is likely unfamiliar with the rural area, as the rural area is sometimes assumed to perform poorly in the development of innovative city initiatives, which are mostly being pioneered by the local government authority with a focus on a city or urban region. Citizens can now participate in decision-making and policy-making due to the smart city project initiative, which cannot be disregarded entirely; unfortunately, rural population participation remains limited. This conceptual research aims to examine smart city project aspirations for the rural community public participation framework. The author comprehends the importance of including significant public participation in all parts of the planning process. The methodology behind this research is based on a detailed study of the scholarly literature that has already been done. The conclusions of the research were derived from a number of different reading materials, such as books, journals, and other sources on smart city programmes for public participation in rural areas

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them

'Imagine if our cities talked to us': Questions about the making of 'responsive' places and urban publics

This book focuses on the surprising generative possibilities which digital and smart technologies offer media consumers, citizens, institutions and governments in making publics and places, across topics as diverse as Twitter audiences, ...Mary Griffith

Smart technologies for personalized experiences: a case study in the hospitality domain

Recent advances in the field of technology have led to the emergence of innovative technological smart solutions providing unprecedented opportunities for application in the tourism and hospitality industry.With intensified competition in the tourism market place, it has become paramount for businesses to explore the potential of technologies, not only to optimize existing processes but facilitate the creation of more meaningful and personalized services and experiences. This study aims to bridge the current knowledge gap between smart technologies and experience personalization to understand how smart mobile technologies can facilitate personalized experiences in the context of the hospitality industry. By adopting a qualitative case study approach, this paper makes a two-fold contribution; it a) identifies the requirements of smart technologies for experience creation, including information aggregation, ubiquitous mobile connectedness and real time synchronization and b) highlights how smart technology integration can lead to two distinct levels of personalized tourism experiences. The paper concludes with the development of a model depicting the dynamic process of experience personalization and a discussion of the strategic implications for tourism and hospitality management and research

The intelligent industry of the future: A survey on emerging trends, research challenges and opportunities in Industry 4.0

Strongly rooted in the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems-enabled manufacturing, disruptive paradigms like the Factory of the Future and Industry 4.0 envision knowledge-intensive industrial intelligent environments where smart personalized products are created through smart processes and procedures. The 4th industrial revolution will be based on Cyber-Physical Systems that will monitor, analyze and automate business processes, transforming production and logistic processes into smart factory environments where big data capabilities, cloud services and smart predictive decision support tools are used to increase productivity and efficiency. This survey provides insights into the latest developments in these domains, and identifies relevant research challenges and opportunities to shape the future of intelligent manufacturing environments.status: publishe

Smart Cities and FDI

Smart cities have emerged as a worldwide trend, progressing from the implementation of sensors and technologies to enhance infrastructures and service delivery to the development of city-wide policy through the utilization of big data analysis. The goal of a "Smart City" is to improve standard of life by acquiring knowledge from information gathered from people, technologies, and networked sensors. This research argues that smart cities may attract inflows Foreign Direct Investment FDI by influencing the investment choices of global corporate players in the new age by facilitating the flow of data, technology, innovations, and best practices while offering a livable and productive environment. When deciding where to invest, foreign investors will take new criteria into account. These factors include how sociable the environment is, how stable the economic condition is, and how digitally advanced the destination is. These variables will outweigh conventional investment considerations like inexpensive labor, abundant resources, and a large population. For developing nations and rising economies where businesses need capital and knowledge to increase their worldwide sales, foreign direct investment is crucial. To maintain high growth rates the countries should attract international investors, and, most importantly, provide its citizens with a good standard of living, and therefore, should speed up its investments in sustainable smart cities. &nbsp

TCitySmartF: A comprehensive systematic framework for transforming cities into smart cities

A shared agreed-upon definition of "smart city" (SC) is not available and there is no "best formula" to follow in transforming each and every city into SC. In a broader inclusive definition, it can be described as an opportunistic concept that enhances harmony between the lives and the environment around those lives perpetually in a city by harnessing the smart technology enabling a comfortable and convenient living ecosystem paving the way towards smarter countries and the smarter planet. SCs are being implemented to combine governors, organisations, institutions, citizens, environment, and emerging technologies in a highly synergistic synchronised ecosystem in order to increase the quality of life (QoL) and enable a more sustainable future for urban life with increasing natural resource constraints. In this study, we analyse how to develop citizen- and resource-centric smarter cities based on the recent SC development initiatives with the successful use cases, future SC development plans, and many other particular SC development solutions. The main features of SC are presented in a framework fuelled by recent technological advancement, particular city requirements and dynamics. This framework - TCitySmartF 1) aims to aspire a platform that seamlessly forges engineering and technology solutions with social dynamics in a new philosophical city automation concept - socio-technical transitions, 2) incorporates many smart evolving components, best practices, and contemporary solutions into a coherent synergistic SC topology, 3) unfolds current and future opportunities in order to adopt smarter, safer and more sustainable urban environments, and 4) demonstrates a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for local governors and private sector about how to transform cities into smarter cities from the technological, social, economic and environmental point of view, particularly by both putting residents and urban dynamics at the forefront of the development with participatory planning and interaction for the robust community- and citizen-tailored services. The framework developed in this paper is aimed to be incorporated into the real-world SC development projects in Lancashire, UK

Policy briefing:further strategies for smart specialisation of the North Sea region

This report uses experience gained during the EU Interreg IVB project ITRACT and shares transnational learning on how to deploy IT-based solutions as part of Smart Specialisation Strategies, for example, while creating answers to societal challenges. ITRACT concentrates on rural areas, where the availability of an adequate digital infrastructure is often lacking and where people may lack the digital skills and literacy to adopt the smart solutions (known as Intelligent Transport Services; ITS) offered. The project addresses transport services as an enabler for smart specialisation