Collaboration or competition: The impact of incentive types on urban cycling

Bicycling is an important mode of transport for cities and many cities are interested in promoting its uptake by a larger portion of the population. Several cycling mobile applications primarily rely on competition as a motivation strategy for urban cyclists. Yet, collaboration may be equally useful to motivate and engage cyclists. The present research reports on an experiment comparing the impact of collaboration-based and competition-based rewards on users’ enjoyment, satisfaction, engagement with, and intention to cycle. It involved a total of 57 participants in three European cities: Münster (Germany), Castelló (Spain), and Valletta (Malta). Our results show participants from the study reporting higher enjoyment and engagement with cycling in the collaboration condition. However, we did not find a significant impact on the participants’ worldview when it comes to the intentions to start or increase cycling behavior. The results support the use of collaboration-based rewards in the design of game-based applications to promote urban cycling

The use of a user-centric smart mobile application prototype for supporting safety and security in a city: a design science method

Cities have always been the drivers of innovation, growth and change. Cities around the world are still rapidly expanding, especially on the African and Asian continents. Cape Town is one of those cities, where urbanisation rates are high, and crime is persisting at alarmingly high levels with crime rates being among the worst in the country and the world. Additionally, the city is home to 7 of 10 worst-performing police services in the country. Combining these factors, there is a need to look at ‘smart' ways of growth which includes facilitating a safe and secure city for citizens. Although Cape Town is pursuing smart initiatives, these have failed to place communities and individuals among the key stakeholders in the smart planning process. This research focuses on further researching smart city initiatives in Cape Town, placing citizens at the centre of the development process. As Cape Town's mobile phone penetration rate is high and access to Internet is rapidly expanding, this research aims to use crowdsourcing techniques for developing a smart mobile application prototype that is focused on enhancing community engagement and facilitating increased perceived feelings of safety and security for citizens. The study uses a Design Science Research method with Cape Town citizens as the main stakeholders, to propose an artifact based on their wishes, needs and current issues faced with regards to safety and security in the city. The proposed artifact focuses on enhancing community engagement, through a chat room and user-logged incident reports, as well as a customised safe route planning functionality where users can send emergency signals to comembers with the use of GPS live location tracking. The research shows participants are willing to adopt the use of the mobile application prototype, given there is substantial community buy-in, and the functionalities in the app are easy to use and quickly accessible. The study further identifies the need for better police follow up and involvement, as the city's police system could benefit from crowd-sourced crime-data in reducing the number of crimes in neighbourhoods to make citizens feel more safe and secure

Succeeding with Smart People Initiatives: Difficulties and Preconditions for Smart City Initiatives that Target Citizens

Smart City is a paradigm for the development of urban spaces through the implementation of state-of-the-art ICT. There are two main approaches when developing Smart Cities: top-down and bottom-up. Based on the bottom-up approach, the concepts of Smart People and Smart Communities have emerged as dimensions of the Smart City, advocating for the engagement of citizens in Smart People initiatives. The aim of this research is both to find the types of Smart People initiatives and to identify their difficulties and preconditions for success. However, such initiatives that aim to (1) leverage the citizens intellectually and (2) use citizens as a source of input for ideas and innovation, are understudied. Therefore, this research proposes a concentrated framework of Smart People initiatives from an extensive literature review. On one hand, this framework contributes with a common ground and vocabulary that facilitates the dialogue within and between practitioners and academia. On the other hand, the identification of difficulties and preconditions guides the academia and practitioners in how to successfully account for citizens in the Smart City. From the literature review and the conduct of case studies of five European cities, participation came out as the key difficulty across both types of Smart People initiatives and cases, closely followed by awareness, motivation and complexity

Motivational Principles and Personalisation Needs for Geo-Crowdsourced Intangible Cultural Heritage Mobile Applications

Whether it’s for altruistic reasons, personal gains, or third party’s interests, users are influenced by different kinds of motivations when making use of mobile geo-crowdsourcing applications (geoCAs). These reasons, extrinsic and/or intrinsic, must be factored in when evaluating the use intention of these applications and how effective they are. A functional geoCA, particularly if designed for Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), is the one that persuades and engages its users, by accounting for their diversity of needs across a period of time. This paper explores a number of proven and novel motivational factors destined for the preservation and collection of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) through geoCAs. By providing an overview of personalisation research and digital behaviour interventions for geo-crowdsoured ICH, the paper examines the most relevant usability and trigger factors for different crowd users, supported by a range of technology-based principles. In addition, we present the case of StoryBee, a mobile geoCA designed for “crafting stories” by collecting and sharing users’ generated content based on their location and favourite places. We conclude with an open-ended discussion about the ongoing challenges and opportunities arising from the deployment of geoCAs for ICH

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

Plan on the move : mobile participation in urban planning state-of-the-art and future potential

Citizen participation in urban planning has been a topic of academic and practical interest since the 1960s. The adoption of information and communication technologies for civic participation, electronic participation, impacts how citizens and urban planners interact. Within the field of electronic participation, mobile participation is a rather recent chapter. The proliferation of mobile technologies enables both novel forms of participation and the embeddedness of these technologies into existing practices of participation. This dissertation contains five studies exploring how emerging practices of mobile participation are changing citizen participation in urban planning. Each of the five studies describes a facet of mobile participation, beginning with an overview of participatory planning apps in use; exploring next how citizens develop apps themselves; turning then to the theoretical basis of mobile participation grounded in previous theories of participation and the digital divide; covering further the actual usage of the Täsä urban planning app; and finally, discussing self-organized community planning using mobile technologies. The results provide an overview of the specific features enhancing democratic urban planning, asses who develops mobile apps and with what intentions, and contrasts the circumstances conducive to inclusiveness in mobile participation. Mobile phones are ubiquitous and possess a combination of unique affordances such as situated engagement and participatory sensing, enabling rich, real-time data collection and experimentation. These features resonate with early adopters who, in order to affect change, need to be embedded in the institutional civic participation setting. For citizens, mobile technologies have diversified the roles of participation, so that citizens can choose between being informed, contributing ideas, or developing applications. Finally, the apps developed with open data are the result of negotiations between developers’ agency and open data availability. Overall, this dissertation suggests that mobile participation is socially constructed in as far as the features and practices implemented are subject to a host of stakeholder interests. To this end, mobile participation is conceptualized as maximum allowed deviation: it affords new practices that reshape citizen participation while being part of established forms of civic participation.Kansalaisten osallistuminen kaupunkisuunnitteluun on kiinnostanut sekä tiedeyhteisöä että suunnittelijoita jo 1960-luvulta lähtien. Informaatio- ja kommunikaatioteknologian omaksuminen sekä sähköinen osallistuminen ovat vaikuttaneet siihen, miten kaupunkilaiset ja suunnittelijat ovat vuorovaikutuksessa toisiinsa. Mobiiliosallistuminen on uusi sähköisen osallistumisen ilmiö. Mobiililaitteiden nopea leviäminen sekä mahdollistaa uusia osallistumismuotoja että sulautuu jo olemassa oleviin käytäntöihin niitä muuntaen. Tämä väitöskirja koostuu viidestä artikkelista, joissa tutkitaan miten mobiiliosallistuminen muuttaa kansalaisten osallistumista kaupunkisuunniteluun. Osatutkimukset tarkastelevat mobiiliosallistumista eri näkökulmista. Ensimmäiseksi on kartoitettu millaisia kaupunkisuunnitteluun ja kaupunkien hallintaan osallistavia sovelluksia maailmassa oli käytössä vuoteen 2015 mennessä. Toiseksi on tutkittu, miten kansalaiset osallistuvat itse sovelluksien kehittämiseen avoimen datan kilpailuissa. Kolmanneksi on tutkittu edellytyksiä mobiiliosallistumiselle, perustaen tarkastelu sosiaalisiin ja poliittisiin osallistumisteorioihin sekä digitaalisen kuilun ylittämistä koskeviin tutkimuksiin. Neljännessä osatutkimuksessa esitellään Turussa 2015 toteutetun mobiiliosallistumisen kokeilun (Täsä) tuloksia ja viidennessä käsitellään mobiiliteknologian käyttöä kaupunkilaisten itse-organisoituvassa osallistumisessa. Tulokset kertovat miten teknologiset ominaisuudet muuttavat osallistuvaa kaupunkisuunnittelua, mikä ja mitkä tahot vaikuttavat sovellusten kehittämiseen avoimella datalla, ja millä ehdoilla mobiililaitteiden avulla voidaan saavuttaa laaja osallistuminen. Mobiililaitteet ovat jo nyt ihmisten mukana kaikkialla. Niiden ominaisuudet mahdollistavat osallistumisen paikan päällä (situated engagement) ja osallistumisen sensoridatan keräämiseen (participatory sensing) ja siten uusiin ja aiempaa monipuolisempiin käyttäjä- ja paikkalähtöisiin analyyseihin. Tämä ominaisuudet ovat olleet houkuttelevia aikaisille omaksujille. Institutionaalista tukea kuitenkin tarvitaan, että uuden teknologian mahdollisuudet voidaan tehdä tutuksi laajalle yleisölle. Mobiiliosallistuminen on myös monipuolistanut osallistumisrooleja: sen avulla kansalaiset voivat aiempaan helpommin valita mitä informaatiota saavat, esittää omia ideoitaan ja kehittää omia sovelluksia.Avoimen datan kilpailuissa kehitetyt sovellukset ovat kompromissi kehittäjien tavoitteiden ja käytössä olevan datan välillä. Kokonaisuudessaan väitöskirja esittää, että mobiiliosallistuminen on sosiaalisesti rakentunutta, siinä määrin kuin sen ominaisuudet ja käytännöt määrittyvät eri tahojen intressien yhteensovittamisessa. Tämän vuoksi mobiiliosallistuminen käsitteellistyy ”suurimmaks sallituksi poikkeamaksi”: se mahdollistaa uusia käytäntöjä jotka muokkaavat kansalaisten osallistumista samalla kun ne ovat jo osa vakiintunutta kansalaisten osallistumista

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

A Service-Oriented Approach to Crowdsensing for Accessible Smart Mobility Scenarios

This work presents an architecture to help designing and deploying smart mobility applications. The proposed solution builds on the experience already matured by the authors in different fields: crowdsourcing and sensing done by users to gather data related to urban barriers and facilities, computation of personalized paths for users with special needs, and integration of open data provided by bus companies to identify the actual accessibility features and estimate the real arrival time of vehicles at stops. In terms of functionality, the first "monolithic" prototype fulfilled the goal of composing the aforementioned pieces of information to support citizens with reduced mobility (users with disabilities and/or elderly people) in their urban movements. In this paper, we describe a service-oriented architecture that exploits the microservices orchestration paradigm to enable the creation of new services and to make the management of the various data sources easier and more effective. The proposed platform exposes standardized interfaces to access data, implements common services to manage metadata associated with them, such as trustworthiness and provenance, and provides an orchestration language to create complex services, naturally mapping their internal workflow to code. The manuscript demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach by means of some case studies

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