Redefining Community Engagement in Smart Cities
Community engagement has been widely discussed in both academic and practitioner literature, in particular around the types of tools, techniques, and methods used to undertake engagement. The practice of community engagement is at risk of becoming fragmented if there is a disconnection between the engagement objectives, the mechanisms used for people to interact, and the outcomes that ultimately contribute towards decision-making. Building on their previous work, including an established set of dynamic design patterns for situated, digitally augmented community engagement, authors propose a smart engagement ecosystem as a conceptual model that has the ability to connect people through physical, digital, online, and hybrid engagement approaches. The model postulates that participation between these various approaches are non-linear and reactive; where each approach can be used individually or collectively within the ecosystem. The chapter discusses how this capability can be leveraged within our smart engagement ecosystem model to connect, engage, and interact with local communities.