Information and communication technologies and public participation: interactive maps and value added for citizens

Cities are restless systems. Increasing urbanisation and the cumulative growth of urban management issues are pressing local governments to provide valuable services. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are established as drivers of this new wave of change in the redefinition of the relationship between the city and its citizens. Smart Cities rely strongly on strategies and solutions enabled by ICTs involving directly local governments, citizens and communities. Open data alone, though a relevant component of these strategies, cannot provide enough incentives for the engagement of citizens necessary to establish a collaborative and open governance system; data need to be appropriately elaborated, communicated and used. The main objective of this paper is to investigate how open data together with simple and standardised elaborations and innovative visualisation techniques may be used to provide new and updated services to citizens and communities: free and readily available services based on the wealth of information ‘owned’ by local governments. Adopting a design science research methodology we develop and test a collaborative ICT-based tool called UrbanSense. We use it to highlight how systemic connections between citizens and city-government may be devised. On this point, the focus is on the feedforwarding of open data integrated with basic elaborations and visualisations as a means for the local government to create new and open services for citizens and communities. The use of the services prompts citizens to feedback new information in real-time to the city government. These interactions may be used to foster an open innovation ecosystem.