Citizen-centric Approach Research Articles

Data Governance in the Sustainable Smart City

The wisdom of ‘smart’ development increasingly shapes urban sustainability in Europe and beyond. Yet, the ‘smart city’ paradigm has been critiqued for favouring technological solutions and business interests over social inclusion and urban innovation. Despite the rhetoric of ‘citizen-centred approaches’ and ‘user-generated data’, the level of stakeholder engagement and public empowerment is still in question. It is unclear how smart city initiatives are developing common visions according to the principles of sustainable urban development. This paper examines how data governance in particular is framed in the new smart city agenda that is focused on sustainability. The challenges and opportunities of data governance in sustainability-driven smart city initiatives are articulated within a conceptual Framework on Sustainable Smart City Data Governance. Drawing on three cases from European countries and a stakeholder survey, the paper shows how governance of data can underpin urban smart and sustainable development solutions. The paper presents insights and lessons from this multi-case study, and discusses risks, challenges, and future research.

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

ABSTRACTGrowing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this article investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development.

Citizen-Centered Journalism and Contested Boundaries

This article explores the existence of a “citizen-centered journalism” that sees citizens as crucial participants in the construction of news and as co-creators of their own worlds. Through qualitative case studies of three news organizations, the article examines the motivation for using a citizen-centered approach, the news routines that are required to do so, the categories of content produced, and the perceived impact of this approach. The results suggest these news organizations are working in partnership with communities and striving to give a voice to historically marginalized communities. The journalists, however, see citizen participation as complementary to professional journalistic routines that favor verifiable information, rather than assigning inherent value to it for its own sake.

E-government Adoption in Developing Countries: Need of Customer-centric Approach: A Case of Pakistan

The e-government implementation in developing countries is always less successful and objectively hard to achieve and the reason behind is a less citizen-centric approach. Therefore, the effect of trust and social influence will be studied while understanding the adoption behavior of citizens in developing countries. Specifically, a case of selected e-service (e-filling of taxation by ‘Federal Board of Revenue' (FBR)) will be studied in Pakistan. The sole purpose of the study is to pull the external factors like trust and social influence to increase e-government adoption in the massively populated region of the world. The quantitative approach will be followed where the current users of selected e-service will be inquired under the modified version of a generic framework of ‘Technology Adoption Model' (TAM). The sample size of 153 is filtered and analyzed by using Structural Equation Modeling (SPSS AMOS) to study the intentions of the citizens. In methodological terms, deductive, quantitative method is adopted in interpretive philosophical manner. Collectively, trust and social influence are studied in order to find the impact on the intentions of citizens in the developing countries. However, the trust is the strongest predictor after social influence is recorded. Similarly, the usefulness observed to be a strong predictor of intentions in comparison of ease of use in the current scenario.

Linking Social Media with E-Government Services (Saudi Arabia case study)

Governments around the world are adapting the e-government initiative to provide new ways of delivering their services. The e-government initiative aims to increase government performance efficiency; however, there are a number of limitations facing the success of the e-government initiative. One of the key limitations is the citizens’ lack of knowledge about the e-government services which, in turn, requires an in-depth understanding of the citizens’ needs in order to provide them with the right service, at the right time. One way to accomplish this is by using the life-event approach, which is considered to be a citizen-centric approach that matches the citizen’s life-events with the needed e-government services. Moreover, with the increasing population using or organising their lives on social media, some services are turning to organising and recording a person’s life. One such example is the ‘timeline’ on Facebook, in which the events in a person’s life are being recorded, and considered to be a source for capturing citizen’s life-events and needs.This research aims to develop a mechanism to advertise e-government services to citizens by using social media based on the life-event approach. Accordingly, the Social Media - Norm-Based Life-Event (SM-NoBLE) system is implemented with a mechanism for extracting citizen’s life-events from citizen interactions with social media. Then, it matches life-events with relevant e-services using the Norm-Based Life-Event (NoBLE) framework and the concept of norms borrowed from organisational semiotics for the matching mechanism. This research creates a case study of Saudi Arabia to apply the SM-NoBLE system to evaluate accuracy and functionality.

Building Universal Socio-cultural Indicators for Standardizing the Safeguarding of Citizens’ Rights in Smart Cities

This research explores the opportunity to use standards as recommender instruments for designing urban policy. Standards are soft regulatory mechanisms that can be used for monitoring and safeguarding. More precisely, we explore the potential use of social standards for centering the focus of the smart cities initiative back to the citizens, and establishing a citizen-centered approach. This is in contrast to the industrial drive and technological emphasis which currently dominates. Accordingly, we present a set of novel citizenship indicators which serve as the basis for the social standardization of smart cities, something which is not now taking place, in order to ensure and safeguard the basic social urban rights of citizens. The juridical basis and well-established points of reference for building indicators for citizens’ rights in the city are two International Charters. These are the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City, and the Global Charter-Agenda for Human Rights in the City. In this paper, we start by comparing and analyzing the rights contained in each of the two Charters, and elaborating indicators for measuring the promotion and protection of these rights. The elaboration of indicators has been based on different criteria and under the common premise of universal existence of feeding data, which is the most recurrent problem when building indicators meant to be global. Next, at the request of the International Standards Organization (ISO), we select the most relevant socio-cultural indicators for the Global Charter Agenda, which will be introduced in the on-going revision of the smart cities and communities standard ISO 37120:2014 Sustainable development of communities—Indicators for city services and quality of life. This will make ISO 37120 a more beneficial social standard for monitoring and safeguarding citizens’ rights in the smart city.

Factors affecting the development of e-government using a citizen-centric approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the factors affecting the development of e-government by using a citizen-centric approach. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a mixed-methods study consisting of qualitative and quantitative research. Data were collected from government agencies using a structured interview and questionnaire about e-government services. The research was collected from the people responsible for the management of an e-government project in 75 government agencies. In addition, the researcher collected data from 1,400 citizens by using an e-Survey questionnaire that grouped participants by age. Findings – By using a citizen-centric approach, the paper identified the factors affecting the development of e-government. There were five factors from the viewpoint of government agencies and citizen groups: quality of e-government services, policy and governance, information technology infrastructure, organization and economy and society. Research limitations/implications – The research covered the development patterns of e-government for services from government to citizens only. Practical implications – Seeing the importance of environmental factors for both service providers and service users would facilitate continuous improvement of e-government service provision by government agencies. Social implications – The results reflect citizens’ need for e-government services; quality is their priority. Hence, government agencies must consider the quality of the delivery of information and e-government services as they relate to the lifestyles and needs of citizens. Originality/value – The creation of knowledge from merging e-government concepts with citizen-centric principles is a modern government sector management theory. This research stresses the need for the government sector to see the need for e-government and to recognize the factors for its successful development. This means the design and development of e-government services should respond to the increasing needs of the citizens.

Redrawing boundaries: WITNESS and the politics of citizen videos

This article engages with several pressing issues revolving around ‘citizen witnessing’, with specific reference to the human rights advocacy group, WITNESS. In the course of tracing WITNESS’ development over the past two decades, it offers an evaluative assessment of the challenges its members have faced in promoting a grass-roots, citizen-centred approach to video reportage. More specifically, this advocacy is informed by an ethical commitment to advancing human rights causes by equipping citizens in crisis situations with cameras, and the training to use them, so that they might bear witness to the plight of others. In so doing, this article argues, WITNESS offers a tactical reformulation of the guiding tenets of peace journalism, one with considerable potential for recasting anew its strategic priorities.

City Indicators on Social Sustainability as Standardization Technologies for Smarter (Citizen-Centered) Governance of Cities

The smart cities initiative encourages cities to improve their performance in the three pillars of sustainability, namely environmental, economic, and social. The smart cities movement is distinguished from sustainable cities by its use of intelligent technologies to attain sustainability. The smart cities world-class initiative is the first and only urban movement to generate interest on the part of all urban stakeholders. This includes citizens, governments, and even industry, which is the most interested party due to its opportunities to sell tech solutions and services to governments, in order to better serve citizens. However, although there are many technological means to help cities successfully perform in the three pillars of sustainability, social sustainability of smart cities is not yet fully considered. And this constitutes a lost opportunity to positively impact citizens’ lives. This research proposes a mechanism to account for the social pillar of sustainability, which consists of measuring the “citizen-centeredness” of city policies and local governance. This citizen-centric approach is measured by monitoring performance of cities in safeguarding citizenship rights. Accordingly, a set of indicators measuring the safeguarding of citizens’ rights in the city included in its fundamental text, The European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City, has been elaborated. Acknowledging the potential of market standards promoted by national and international standardization bodies such as the International Standards Organization or the National Standardization Association in Spain, proposed indicators have been designed to serve as a basis for what could be the first-ever social standard. Since market standards have an econometric nature, this research has been carried out in total fairness to city council responsibilities, only accounting for those which are mandatory, for which a budget is assigned. Finally, in the last section of the paper, conclusions show the triple-win—for citizens, private stakeholders, and city councils, that the inclusion of social standards brings into the governance of cities.

People power and anti-corruption; demystifying citizen-centred approaches

In recent years there has been an ever expanding body of work that advocates putting the citizen at the centre of attempts to tackle corruption. The task of anti-corruption policy, so the argument goes, is to empower citizens to act against those who behave in a corrupt fashion. This article illustrates that whilst there is much to be said for encouraging citizens to move against corrupt officials, and citizen-centred anti-corruption ideas subsequently appear attractive in theory, implementing these notions (as they currently stand) in practice is problematic. Attacking corruption may well often be done most successfully by not openly claiming that that is the aim, and by embracing more indirect reform paths. The article concludes that without buy-in from not just citizens, but also from governments and external agents, citizen-centred anti-corruption mechanisms become limited, potentially irrelevant or even damaging as citizen apathy and frustration increases.

Re-Establishing the Relationship with the Public

Public journalism is viewed by many as a solution to the decreasing media presence and public involvement in regional news media. Core values in this approach are public deliberation, participation, and connectedness. This study investigates the added value of a citizen-centred approach to journalism routines and news content in a collaborative regional media project in the Netherlands. Data were gathered using observations, interviews, and content analyses. Results show that even in a newly created news environment, existing journalistic routines largely prevent incorporation of a bottom-up approach in daily news production. Furthermore, active citizenship does not seem to be common: citizens did not participate readily in news production. While news content shows a greater focus on local communities and citizen sources, citizen sources were overwhelmingly used in vox pops rather than more active roles in which their expertise, experience, or specific knowledge was relevant.

Next-Gen E-Government: A Study on Reconciling Data Protection and Government 2.0

The evolving model of the Future Internet has at its heart, Internet users. The Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 initiatives help citizens communicate better with their government. Such initiatives have the potential to empower citizens by giving them a strong voice in both traditional and digital society. Pressure is mounting on governments to listen to the voice of the public expressed through these technologies and incorporate their needs into public policy. On the other hand, governments still have a duty to protect their citizens’ personal information against unlawful and malicious intent. This responsibility is essential to any government in an age where there is an increasing burden on citizens to interact with governments via electronic means. This paper examines this dual agenda of modern governments to engage with its citizens, on the one hand, to encourage transparency and open discussion, and to provide digitally offered public services which require the protection of citizens’ private information on the other. It is argued that a citizen-centric approach to online privacy protection that works in tandem with the open government agenda will provide a unified mode of interaction between citizens, businesses and governments in digital society.

Preparing for Tomorrow's Social Policy Agenda

This 2002 strategic planning paper was prepared under contract for Human Resources Development Canada, a federal government department with a broad mandate for income security, social and labour market policies and programs. While the historical analysis of the paper is now dated, the main findings related to policy challenges and responses have stood the test of time. The proposed directions for policy development, and the approach taken to strategic planning, remain relevant todayThe paper identified the main forces that were likely to dominate policy during the early 2000s: a continuation of the competitiveness and social cohesion pressures that had resulted in a preoccupation with lifelong learning; a new concern about a decline in percentage of the total population that will be employed; and a new shift towards incentives to later retirement. Five policy responses are indicated: First, the then current human development and skills agenda would continue as a dominant theme in the policy response for many years. In the medium-term, the emphasis should shift to learning (not skills) and to ways of translating the rhetoric of social investment into operational, evidence-driven programming. Second a policy shift towards encouraging life-course flexibility, which would reverse the trend toward policies that encourage longer schooling and earlier retirement. The goal of such a shift would be to support greater choice at the level of individuals and, at the level of society, more time being spent in work and learning over the course of people’s lives, with a more rational distribution of leisure over the course of life. Third, there should be a gradual shift towards a more integrated approach to social policy. Today income-at-a-point-in-time concepts still dominate income security policies, while active, preparing-for-life policies are mainly found in separate and fragmented systems – education, labour market integration, childcare, etc. Tomorrow there should be a more integrated, enabling-society, citizen-centred approach, including a new emphasis on life-course and asset perspectives. Fourth, emphasis should be placed on building a new capacity for making social investments effective. Today, policy has the rhetorical goal of social investment (getting payoffs in the future). However, policy designs are actually based on expenditures (getting payoffs in the present). Tomorrow, we should bring policy designs into line with their underlying social investment goals. This means switching to self-learning policies that use new information processing technologies to automatically incorporate lessons from what has worked best in similar circumstances in the past – i.e., real-time, evidence-driven programming. Fifth, is a new emphasis on using current information management technology to resolve a long-standing and central machinery-of-government problem – reconciling vertical integration (decision-making by or near the citizen/group most affected, while maintaining accountability and ministerial responsibility) and horizontal integration (harmonized action across a wide variety of program streams and responsible agencies)’The paper provides practical examples of what needs to be done in all of these areas. The paper deals with the inevitable risks of planning for an unknowable future by providing scenarios that are based not on the traditional approach of forecasting ahead based on past trends, but rather on the kind of futures that governments have indicated they would like to help construct.

A Citizen-Centred Approach to Education in the Smart City

Smart cities are often developed in a top-down approach and designers may see citizens as bits within data flows. A more human-centred perspective would be to consider what the smart city might afford its citizens. A high speed, pervasive network infrastructure offers the opportunity for ubiquitous mobile learning to become a reality. The MASELTOV project sees the smart city as enabling technology enhanced incidental learning: unplanned or unintentional learning that takes place in everyday life, in any place, at any time, with the city itself the context and the prompt for learning episodes. Migrants in particular will benefit: limited in their opportunity to attend formal education yet with a pressing need for language learning to support their integration. Incidental learning services, like smart city planning, need interdisciplinary communication for successful development. The authors describe the MASELTOV Incidental Learning Framework which will act as a boundary object to facilitate this process.

Empowering citizens with access control mechanisms to their personal health resources

BackgroundAdvancements in information and communication technologies have allowed the development of new approaches to the management and use of healthcare resources. Nowadays it is possible to address complex issues such as meaningful access to distributed data or communication and understanding among heterogeneous systems. As a consequence, the discussion focuses on the administration of the whole set of resources providing knowledge about a single subject of care (SoC). New trends make the SoC administrator and responsible for all these elements (related to his/her demographic data, health, well-being, social conditions, etc.) and s/he is granted the ability of controlling access to them by third parties. The subject of care exchanges his/her passive role without any decision capacity for an active one allowing to control who accesses what. PurposeWe study the necessary access control infrastructure to support this approach and develop mechanisms based on semantic tools to assist the subject of care with the specification of access control policies. This infrastructure is a building block of a wider scenario, the Person-Oriented Virtual Organization (POVO), aiming at integrating all the resources related to each citizen's health-related data. The POVO covers the wide range and heterogeneity of available healthcare resources (e.g., information sources, monitoring devices, or software simulation tools) and grants each SoC the access control to them. MethodsSeveral methodological issues are crucial for the design of the targeted infrastructure. The distributed system concept and focus are reviewed from the service oriented architecture (SOA) perspective. The main frameworks for the formalization of distributed system architectures (Reference Model-Open Distributed Processing, RM-ODP; and Model Driven Architecture, MDA) are introduced, as well as how the use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) is standardized. The specification of access control policies and decision making mechanisms are essential keys for this approach and they are accomplished by using semantic technologies (i.e., ontologies, rule languages, and inference engines). ResultsThe results are mainly focused on the security and access control of the proposed scenario. An ontology has been designed and developed for the POVO covering the terminology of the scenario and easing the automation of administration tasks. Over that ontology, an access control mechanism based on rule languages allows specifying access control policies, and an inference engine performs the decision making process automatically. The usability of solutions to ease administration tasks to the SoC is improved by the Me-As-An-Admin (M3A) application. This guides the SoC through the specification of personal access control policies to his/her distributed resources by using semantic technologies (e.g., metamodeling, model-to-text transformations, etc.). All results are developed as services and included in an architecture in accordance with standards and principles of openness and interoperability. ConclusionsCurrent technology can bring health, social and well-being care actually centered on citizens, and granting each person the management of his/her health information. However, the application of technology without adopting methodologies or normalized guidelines will reduce the interoperability of solutions developed, failing in the development of advanced services and improved scenarios for health delivery. Standards and reference architectures can be cornerstones for future-proof and powerful developments. Finally, not only technology must follow citizen-centric approaches, but also the gaps needing legislative efforts that support these new paradigms of healthcare delivery must be identified and addressed.

Requirements engineering for e-Government services: A citizen-centric approach and case study

Throughout the last decade, user involvement in e-Government service design has been virtually non-existent. Over time, e-Government experts began to realize that these services would benefit from a citizen-centric requirements engineering approach which has led to a demand for such an approach for this particular field. This article presents a citizen-centric approach towards user requirements engineering for e-Government services. It utilizes interviews and citizen walkthroughs of low-fidelity prototypes. A case study of a social support portal illustrates the approach and shows the need for repeated citizen inquiry, as the implementation of user requirements in low-fidelity prototype design is not always accepted by prospective end-users.

Living Lab: an open and citizen-centric approach for innovation

In this paper, we focus on a new research area, Living Lab that introduces new ways of managing innovation processes. A Living Lab can be viewed as both an innovation milieu and an innovation approach and the aim of this paper is to clarify these two perspectives, as well as to illustrate how they can enrich each other. This is done by presenting one Living Lab milieu, Botnia Living Lab and its key components; and one Living Lab approach, FormIT and its key principles. The presentation is done on two levels, one general level and one case specific level. The case focuses on involving citizens in the design of an e-service aimed to increase their influence in a municipality and its development. Through this, we learnt that the key components of a Living Lab constitutes important structures that enhance the process and as such the principles.

Service satisfaction through external knowledge management

Service improvement represents one of the primary goals for public-sector reforms in several countries. This paper demonstrates an in-depth analysis into one Thai public agency. In this example, the Nakhon Pathom City District or the NPCD has experienced high satisfaction levels from citizens of more than 90% in terms of accessibility, atmosphere, etc. Importantly, the NPCD has not requested additional funds to help sustain service operations despite increasing demands from residents and nonresidents. Instead, the district chief has applied Knowledge Management (KM), initiated and supported by the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission (OPDC). The Kasetsart University and the OPDC or the KU-OPDC research team illustrates many useful examples, including home-delivery services (similar to pizza-delivery services) and retail banking (e.g., opening the branch in the supermarkets or shopping malls). This study also demonstrates other important viewpoints such as the citizen-centred approach and win-win attitude when striving for service improvement.

An evaluation of the information content of local authority websites in the UK using citizen-based scenarios

The UK Government is pursuing ambitious targets for the delivery of e-government at the local level. As part of the implementation of local e-government, all of the 468 local authorities in the UK now have a website. Surveys show significant advances in the delivery of online local government services, but despite this the level of usage of e-government by citizens in the UK is low compared to other countries at a similar level of e-maturity. One reason hypothesised for this is that the websites do not meet citizens' information needs and consequently fail to engage them. A pilot study was undertaken to explore the use of real life scenario-based queries as a method for evaluating information provision on local authority websites. The findings suggest that even websites that perform highly in terms of accessibility, transactional capability and ease of use will not necessarily meet citizens' information needs. The authors conclude that a citizen-centred approach to developing e-government systems, including the identification of information needs, could generate the 'user pull' needed to stimulate uptake and achieve the intended benefits.

E-government in a developing country: citizen-centric approach for success

There are very few successful e-government projects in developing countries. Most e-government projects within developing countries employ high-technology intervention whereas citizens are not ready for this. There are successful projects which took a low end route. This paper examines one such project to find out the reasons behind its success. The research concludes that stakeholders' participation is the driving factor for success. The major issue is not IT, but an understanding between the citizen population and their complimentary governmental entity, which acts as the critical factor for triumph in e-government.