Smart Communities and Community Empowerment for Environmental Sustainability

The development of urban systems towards smart cities encourages the existence of smart communities as well. Smart communities are influenced by social developments in the community, which is dynamic and influenced by society and individuals’ social level. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the use of social capital in building a smart society. This article uses the qualitative method analysis which is a literature study of 18 documents. Based on the literature study, the use of social capital in the community can encourage community empowerment activities because trust and a cooperative attitudes are built among residents. This will affect the habits and activities of individuals in society, such as the development process of protecting the environment. Increasing empowerment activities will help accelerate the process of developing a smart community. Therefore, social capital is essential in the development of smart communities and smart cities.

SEE-TREND: SEcurE Traffic-Related EveNt Detection in Smart Communities

It has been widely recognized that one of the critical services provided by Smart Cities and Smart Communities is Smart Mobility. This paper lays the theoretical foundations of SEE-TREND, a system for Secure Early Traffic-Related EveNt Detection in Smart Cities and Smart Communities. SEE-TREND promotes Smart Mobility by implementing an anonymous, probabilistic collection of traffic-related data from passing vehicles. The collected data are then aggregated and used by its inference engine to build beliefs about the state of the traffic, to detect traffic trends, and to disseminate relevant traffic-related information along the roadway to help the driving public make informed decisions about their travel plans, thereby preventing congestion altogether or mitigating its nefarious effects.

Addressing Spatial Inequality in Broadband Use and Community-Level Outcomes

This chapter considers the significance of place for broadband policy evaluation and examines long-term data on Chicago neighborhoods as an example of quasi-experimental design. Interventions are often targeted to low-income urban neighborhoods or rural communities, with goals for increased local employment, economic development, or community health. Measuring outcomes by place provides a way to aggregate impacts for individual residents and to suggest potential spillover benefits for communities. Evaluating broadband use (i.e., subscriptions) over time in communities can address issues of causation as well as long-term outcomes of use. Chicago’s Smart Communities program illustrates the benefits of conducting long-term evaluation, taking advantage of new American Community Survey data that allows tracking of broadband subscriptions in smaller or less-populated geographies such as neighborhoods or rural communities. Finally, the chapter discusses strategies for expanding community-level research through other quasi-experimental designs and the creation and utilization of community-level data on broadband adoption and use.

Fostering Cyber-Physical Social Systems through an Ontological Approach to Personality Classification Based on Social Media Posts

The exponential increase in social networks has led to emergent convergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and social computing, accelerating the creation of smart communities and smart organizations and enabling the concept of cyber-physical social systems. Social media platforms have made a significant contribution to what we call human behavior modeling. This paper presents a novel approach to developing a users’ segmentation tool for the Romanian language, based on the four DISC personality types, based on social media statement analysis. We propose and design the ontological modeling approach of the specific vocabulary for each personality and its mapping with text from posts on social networks. This research proposal adds significant value both in terms of scientific and technological contributions (by developing semantic technologies and tools), as well as in terms of business, social and economic impact (by supporting the investigation of smart communities in the context of cyber-physical social systems). For the validation of the model developed we used a dataset of almost 2000 posts retrieved from 10 social medial accounts (Facebook and Twitter) and we have obtained an accuracy of over 90% in identifying the personality profile of the users.

Gamification-less: may gamification really foster civic participation? A controlled field experiment

In the context of smart communities, it is essential an active and continuous collaboration between citizens, organizations and institutions. There are several cases where citizens may be asked to participate such as in public decision-making process by informing, voting or proposing projects or in crisis management by sharing precise and timely information with other citizens and emergency organizations. However, these opportunities do not automatically result in participatory practices sustained over time. Mobile technologies and social networks provide the substratum for supporting formal empowerment, but citizen engagement in participation processes is still an open issue. One of the techniques used to improve engagement is gamification based on the humans’ predisposition to games. So far, we still lack studies that can prove the advantage of gamified systems respect to non-gamified ones in civic participation context. In this work, we present a between-group design experiment performed in the wild using two mobile applications enabling civic participation, one gamified and the other not. Our results highlight that the gamified application generates a better user experience and civic engagement.

Smart city community governance based on blockchain big data platform

In many fields of today’s society, the value that blockchain big data can bring has attracted more and more people’s attention. Due to people’s concerns, the rapid development of blockchain big data-related technologies, and their extensive application in national strategic guidelines, academic exploration, and life production, many countries now include the development of big data in their national blueprint plans for the future. China’s progress in big data is obvious to everyone, and it plays an important role in exploring the construction and governance of smart city communities. This article explores the research of smart city community governance based on the blockchain big data platform. Through analyzing the role of the blockchain big data platform, using the PBFT blockchain consensus algorithm, technology method, smart community governance model, etc., we try to provide community development suggestions, to further explore community governance innovation from the perspective of smart communities, which will provide new ideas for innovative social governance methods and help improve social service skills as a whole. The experimental results of this paper show that 77%of smart community management is still in its infancy, but smart city community governance based on the blockchain big data platform promotes smart communities to better serve residents and promotes the widespread and effective promotion of distinctive community governance models.