Durable Civic Technology

Minecraft is a video game that allows players to interact with a 3D environment. Launched in 2009, Minecraft has surprisingly durable popularity. Users report that Minecraft is easy to learn and understand, engaging and immersive, and adaptable. Outside North America it has been piloted for urban planning public consultation processes. Five years ago, authors conducted research using key informant interviews. This study asked practicing urban planners in Canada to assess Minecraft's potential. Key findings address Minecraft's usefulness as a visualization tool, its role in building public trust in local planning processes, the place of play in planning, and the challenges associated with its use in public consultation. This chapter explores Minecraft's ongoing use, offers reflections as to how this game could effectively be used for public consultation, and concludes with key lessons for urban planners whose practice intersects with our digitally-enabled world, with a particular focus on new application possibilities in smart city planning projects.

Civic Technology and Data for Good

Governments have long dealt with the issue of engaging their constituents in the process of governance, and e-participation efforts have been a part of this effort. Almost all of these efforts have been controlled by government. Civic technology and data4good, fueled by the movement toward open government and open civic data, represent a sea change in this relationship. A similar movement is data for good, which uses volunteer data scientists to address social problems using advanced analytics and large datasets. Working through a variety of organizations, they apply the power of data to problems. This chapter will explore these possibilities and outline a set of scenarios that might be possible. The chapter has four parts. The first part looks at citizen participation in broad brush, with special attention to e-participation. The next two sections look at civic technology and data4good. The final section looks at the possible changes that these two embryonic movements can have on the structure of participation in government and to the nature of public management.

Using Open Source, Open Data, and Civic Technology to Address the COVID-19 Pandemic and Infodemic

Objectives: The emerging COVID-19 pandemic has caused one of the world’s worst health disasters compounded by social confusion with misinformation, the so-called “Infodemic”. In this paper, we discuss how open technology approaches - including data sharing, visualization, and tooling - can address the COVID-19 pandemic and infodemic. Methods: In response to the call for participation in the 2020 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook theme issue on Medical Informatics and the Pandemic, the IMIA Open Source Working Group surveyed recent works related to the use of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) for this pandemic. Results: FLOSS health care projects including GNU Health, OpenMRS, DHIS2, and others, have responded from the early phase of this pandemic. Data related to COVID-19 have been published from health organizations all over the world. Civic Technology, and the collaborative work of FLOSS and open data groups were considered to support collective intelligence on approaches to managing the pandemic. Conclusion: FLOSS and open data have been effectively used to contribute to managing the COVID-19 pandemic, and open approaches to collaboration can improve trust in data.

How do we know that it works? Designing a digital democratic innovation with the help of user-centered design

Civic technology is used to improve not only policies, but to reinforce politics and has the potential to strengthen democracy. A search for new ways of involving citizens in decision-making processes combined with a growing smartphone penetration rate has generated expectations around smartphones as democratic tools. However, if civic applications do not meet citizens’ expectations and function poorly, they might remain unused and fail to increase interest in public issues. Therefore, there is a need to apply a citizen’s perspective on civic technology. The aim of this study is to gain knowledge about how citizens’ wishes and needs can be included in the design and evaluation process of a civic application. The study has an explorative approach and uses mixed methods. We analyze which democratic criteria citizens emphasize in a user-centered design process of a civic application by conducting focus groups and interviews. Moreover, a laboratory usability study measures how well two democratic criteria, inclusiveness and publicity, are met in an application. The results show that citizens do emphasize democratic criteria when participating in the design of a civic application. A user-centered design process will increase the likelihood of a usable application and can help fulfill the democratic criteria designers aim for.

Developing better Civic Services through Crowdsourcing: The Twitter Case Study

<p>Civic technology is a fast-developing segment that holds huge potential for a new generation of startups. A recent survey report on civic technology noted that the sector saw $430 million in investment in just the last two years. It's not just a new market ripe with opportunity it's crucial to our democracy. Crowdsourcing has proven to be an effective supplementary mechanism for public engagement in city government in order to use mutual knowledge in online communities to address such issues as a means of engaging people in urban design. Government needs new alternatives -- alternatives of modern, superior tools and services that are offered at reasonable rates. An effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables wide participation. Response to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is very crucial for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a society. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms. In this research, we are trying to introduce a crowdsourcing platform, which will be helpful to people who are facing problems in their everyday practice because of the government services. This platform will gather the information from the trending twitter tweets for last month or so and try to identify which challenges public is confronting. Twitter for crowdsourcing as it is a simple social platform for questions and for the people who see the tweet to get an instant answer. These problems will be analyzed based on their significance which then will be made open to public for its solutions. The findings demonstrate how crowdsourcing tends to boost community engagement, enhances citizens ' views of their town and thus tends us find ways to enhance the city's competitiveness, which faces some serious problems. Using of topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm helped get categorized civic technology topics which was then validated by simple classification algorithm. While working on this research, we encountered some issues regarding to the tools that were available which we have discussed in the ‘Counter arguments’ section. <br></p>

Developing better Civic Services through Crowdsourcing: The Twitter Case Study

<p>Civic technology is a fast-developing segment that holds huge potential for a new generation of startups. A recent survey report on civic technology noted that the sector saw $430 million in investment in just the last two years. It's not just a new market ripe with opportunity it's crucial to our democracy. Crowdsourcing has proven to be an effective supplementary mechanism for public engagement in city government in order to use mutual knowledge in online communities to address such issues as a means of engaging people in urban design. Government needs new alternatives -- alternatives of modern, superior tools and services that are offered at reasonable rates. An effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables wide participation. Response to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is very crucial for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a society. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms. In this research, we are trying to introduce a crowdsourcing platform, which will be helpful to people who are facing problems in their everyday practice because of the government services. This platform will gather the information from the trending twitter tweets for last month or so and try to identify which challenges public is confronting. Twitter for crowdsourcing as it is a simple social platform for questions and for the people who see the tweet to get an instant answer. These problems will be analyzed based on their significance which then will be made open to public for its solutions. The findings demonstrate how crowdsourcing tends to boost community engagement, enhances citizens ' views of their town and thus tends us find ways to enhance the city's competitiveness, which faces some serious problems. Using of topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm helped get categorized civic technology topics which was then validated by simple classification algorithm. While working on this research, we encountered some issues regarding to the tools that were available which we have discussed in the ‘Counter arguments’ section. <br></p>

Durable Civic Technology

Minecraft is a video game that allows players to interact with a 3D environment. Launched in 2009, Minecraft has surprisingly durable popularity. Users report that Minecraft is easy to learn and understand, engaging and immersive, and adaptable. Outside North America it has been piloted for urban planning public consultation processes. Five years ago, authors conducted research using key informant interviews. This study asked practicing urban planners in Canada to assess Minecraft's potential. Key findings address Minecraft's usefulness as a visualization tool, its role in building public trust in local planning processes, the place of play in planning, and the challenges associated with its use in public consultation. This chapter explores Minecraft's ongoing use, offers reflections as to how this game could effectively be used for public consultation, and concludes with key lessons for urban planners whose practice intersects with our digitally-enabled world, with a particular focus on new application possibilities in smart city planning projects.

Civic Technology and Data for Good

Governments have long dealt with the issue of engaging their constituents in the process of governance, and e-participation efforts have been a part of this effort. Almost all of these efforts have been controlled by government. Civic technology and data4good, fueled by the movement toward open government and open civic data, represent a sea change in this relationship. A similar movement is data for good, which uses volunteer data scientists to address social problems using advanced analytics and large datasets. Working through a variety of organizations, they apply the power of data to problems. This chapter will explore these possibilities and outline a set of scenarios that might be possible. The chapter has four parts. The first part looks at citizen participation in broad brush, with special attention to e-participation. The next two sections look at civic technology and data4good. The final section looks at the possible changes that these two embryonic movements can have on the structure of participation in government and to the nature of public management.