scholarly journals Developing Knowledge-Based Citizen Participation Platform to Support Smart City Decision Making: The Smarticipate Case Study

Information ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaheer Khan ◽  
Jens Dambruch ◽  
Jan Peters-Anders ◽  
Andreas Sackl ◽  
Anton Strasser ◽  
...  
i-com ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Daniel Wessel ◽  
Julien Holtz ◽  
Florian König

Abstract Smart cities have a huge potential to increase the everyday efficiency of cities, but also to increase preparation and resilience in case of natural disasters. Especially for disasters which are somewhat predicable like floods, sensor data can be used to provide citizens with up-to-date, personalized and location-specific information (street or even house level resolution). This information allows citizens to better prepare to avert water damage to their property, reduce the needed government support, and — by connecting citizens locally — improve mutual support among neighbors. But how can a smart city application be designed that is both usable and able to function during disaster conditions? Which smart city information can be used? How can the likelihood of mutual, local support be increased? In this practice report, we present the human-centered development process of an app to use Smart City data to better prepare citizens for floods and improve their mutual support during disasters as a case study to answer these questions.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1407-1427
Author(s):  
Carlo Francesco Capra

Smart cities are associated almost exclusively with modern technology and infrastructure. However, smart cities have the possibility to enhance the involvement and contribution of citizens to urban development. This work explores the role of governance as one of the factors influencing the participation of citizens in smart cities projects. Governance characteristics play a major role in explaining different typologies of citizen participation. Through a focus on Amsterdam Smart City program as a specific case study, this research examines the characteristics of governance that are present in the overall program and within a selected sample of projects, and how they relate to different typologies of citizen participation. The analysis and comprehension of governance characteristics plays a crucial role both for a better understanding and management of citizen participation, especially in complex settings where multiple actors are interacting.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-268
Author(s):  
Ángel H. Iglesias Alonso ◽  
Roberto L. Barbeito Iglesias

In 2015, the local government of the city of Madrid (Spain) introduced an electronic participation system. This initiative stemmed mainly from the social movements that had occupied the squares of many Spanish cities since 2011. As a result of the local elections in 2015, many of those same activists gained institutional power, took citizens’ participation very seriously, and decided to use the possibilities offered by the internet for political and administrative participation. In this article, we seek to assess the impacts of the Madrid city government with the e-democracy experiment – based mainly on establishing an online platform to facilitate citizen participation in political and administrative decision processes. Drawing on qualitative and documental data, our research indicates that whereas the overall aim of the project was to give citizens a say in local policy and decision making, our case study shows that participation was very low since most of the population does not feel concerned by these processes. Indeed, one of our findings showed that citizens’ involvement offline surpassed in some cases their online participation. To identify who is politically active online and offline is a great challenge, to which the promoters of the project did not pay much attention. Although e-participation was meagre in relation to the electoral turnout, the case study also shows that many proposals from the public were incorporated into the local policies, indicating that from a qualitative point of view, e-participation influences decision-making processes. Perhaps local governments should use a more strategic and integrated approach towards the use of electronic technologies to foster and motivate citizens’ involvement in local politics and administration. This more integrated approach should be less dependent on ideological incentives, more institutionalized, and must incorporate citizens’ perceptions and inputs before the introduction of new technologies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Sergey Fedorchenko ◽  
E. Karlyavina

The main purpose of the article is to study technologies of a smart city to identify the prospects for digital democracy and risks of digital totalitarianism. The basic methodological optics is the discourse analysis, which involves the identification and comparative analysis of various concepts on the selected issues. The supporting methodology was the Case Study principles and the big data analysis capabilities of the Google Trends platform. The article makes a theoretical contribution to the understanding of the algorithmic nature of modern political power, which is the basis of urban technopolitics, as well as the complex configuration of Policy and Politics. Algorithms, as the fundamental basis of digital applications and smart city technologies, are beginning to permeate the entire life of a citizen, closely intertwining with the mechanisms of digital control, rating, political decision-making, extraction, filtering and sorting of information data. It is particularly emphasized that the traditional social reality is transformed into a sociotechnical reality (the phygital world), in which it is no longer possible to rigidly separate the social from the technical. The conclusions indicate that digital democracy is possible only on the principles of open source, while digital totalitarianism, on the contrary, excludes such a model. Without the inclusion of smart citizens, the process of discussion and political decision-making, digital democracy is simply emasculated into a good, but still narrow service on the part of the authorities. In addition, without comprehensive programs in the field of political education, there will be no digital democracy, no smart citizens, only a smart elite will remain.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 6103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonso Unceta ◽  
Xabier Barandiaran ◽  
Natalia Restrepo

Public sector innovation labs have gained increasing importance as one of the material expressions of public sector innovation and collaborative governance to address complex societal problems. In the current international context, there are various experiences, interpretations, and applications of this concept with similarities and differences but all of them are based fundamentally on the establishment of new forms of participation and collaboration between governments and civil society. This paper aims to examine, through a case study, how policy innovation labs could play a prominent role in promoting decision-making at the local level in order to create a more sustainable public sector. To do this, this article focuses on an analysis of the “Gipuzkoa Lab”, a public innovation lab developed in the Gipuzkoa region located in the Basque Country, Spain, in order to confront future socio-economic challenges via an open participatory approach. An analysis of a pilot project to address worker participation, developed within this participatory process, indicates that these collaborative spaces have important implications for the formulation of public policies and can change public actions, yielding benefits and engaging citizens, workers, private companies and academics. This paper provides a contemporary approach to understanding good practice in collaborative governance and a novel process for facilitating the balance between the state and civil society, and between public functions and the private sphere, for decision-making. In particular, this case study may be of interest to international practitioners and researchers to introduce the increasingly popular concept of public sector innovation labs into debates of citizen participation and decision-making.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (22) ◽  
pp. 8040
Author(s):  
Marjorie M. Bellinello ◽  
Miguel A. C. Michalski ◽  
Arthur H. A. Melani ◽  
Adherbal Caminada Netto ◽  
Carlos A. Murad ◽  
...  

Decision-making regarding maintenance planning has become increasingly critical. In view of the need for more assertive decisions, methods, and tools based on failure analysis, performance indicators, and risk analysis have obtained great visibility. One of these methods, the Variation and Mode Effect Analysis (VMEA), is a statistically based method that analyses the effect of different sources of variations on a system. One great advantage of VMEA is to facilitate the understanding of these variations and to highlight the system areas in which improvement efforts should be directed. However, like many knowledge-based methods, the inherent epistemic uncertainty can be propagated to its result, influencing following decisions. To minimize this issue, this work proposes the novel combination of VMEA with Paraconsistent Annotated Logic (PAL), a technique that withdraws the principle of noncontradiction, allowing better decision-making when contradictory opinions are present. To demonstrate the method applicability, a case study analyzing a hydrogenerator components is presented. Results show how the proposed method is capable of indicating which are the failure modes that most affect the analyzed system, as well as which variables must be monitored so that the symptoms related to each failure mode can be observed, helping in decision-making regarding maintenance planning.


2018 ◽  
pp. 321-341
Author(s):  
Carlo Francesco Capra

Smart cities are associated almost exclusively with modern technology and infrastructure. However, smart cities have the possibility to enhance the involvement and contribution of citizens to urban development. This work explores the role of governance as one of the factors influencing the participation of citizens in smart cities projects. Governance characteristics play a major role in explaining different typologies of citizen participation. Through a focus on Amsterdam Smart City program as a specific case study, this research examines the characteristics of governance that are present in the overall program and within a selected sample of projects, and how they relate to different typologies of citizen participation. The analysis and comprehension of governance characteristics plays a crucial role both for a better understanding and management of citizen participation, especially in complex settings where multiple actors are interacting.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-72
Author(s):  
Mohammed Benali ◽  
Abdessamed Réda Ghomari ◽  
Leila Zemmouchi-Ghomari ◽  
Mohammed Lazar

Crisis events put crisis response organizations in a unique and complex situation that requires critical real-time distributed decision-making so that lives and properties are saved and protected. With the growing development of collaborative technologies, citizen participation to the crisis management process has shifted from the passive one-way contribution of social networking data to a more active participation by performing specific tasks related to crisis data processing. This article presents a comprehensive approach for integrating the crowdsourcing process to the collaborative decisional process in crisis situations. Within the approach three aspects are highlighted: the coordination work that exists between the relevant stakeholders in making collective decisions, the modeling of case dependent activities within the decisional process, and the detailed modeling of decision-related tasks. The authors investigate the applicability of the proposal with a real-world case study of the Desert Locust Plague carried out in the Algerian National Institute of Plant Protection.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-553
Author(s):  
Nawal Sad-Houari ◽  
Noria Taghezout ◽  
Aissa Nador

The challenges of the development of a suitable ontology scheme in decision-making environment should be taken in conjunction with the exploitation of more recent technologies. It is expected that the use of ontologies will lead to the construction of more intelligent applications, allowing them to work more specifically at a human conceptual level. We propose in this article an approach that analyses the impact of changes in the ontology on business rules in order to detect inconsistencies that may be generated. In addition, the developed tool provides solutions to repair inconsistencies with the help of domain experts. In our work, business rules are edited from the concepts and properties that are stored in an OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology named OntoloG. This latter is implemented throughout the use of Protégé 4.0.2.with the OWL sub-language. OntoloG has been developed by the knowledge acquisition from documents, collection and capitalisation of business rules process with experts in SONATRACH AVAL.


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