Civic Technology Research Articles

Hear Me Out: Supporting Citizens to Create Comprehensible Contributions on Urban Participation Platforms

Urbanization has increased societal tensions and led to the growth of citizen participation in urban planning, which is often conducted in computer-supported environments and progressively online to include a high number of citizens. Past projects have shown that digital participation creates new challenges and that collaborative online discussions do not achieve the quality of on-site scenarios, as the interactions, in-depth exchange of opinions, and quality of contributions vary. Within a design science research project, we examine how to support citizens in creating comprehensible contributions on urban participation platforms. We identify issues, formulate meta-requirements, and derive design principles to implement feasible prototypes that we evaluated in focus groups. Our findings extend the existing research about urban participation platforms in civic tech, urban informatics, and planning, with validated design principles that specify AI-based feedback and further features to increase interactions and support citizens in producing more specific contributions.

Anonymization of Voices in Spaces for Civic Dialogue: Measuring Impact on Empathy, Trust, and Feeling Heard

Anonymity is a powerful component of many participatory media platforms that can afford people greater freedom of expression and protection from external coercion and interference. However, it can be difficult to effectively implement on platforms that leverage spoken language due to distinct biomarkers present in the human voice. In this work, we explore the use of voice anonymization methods within the context of a technology-enhanced civic dialogue network based in the United States, whose purpose is to increase feelings of agency and being heard within civic processes. Specifically, we investigate the use of two different speech transformation and synthesis methods for anonymization: voice conversion (VC) and text-to-speech (TTS). Through a series of two studies, we examine the impact that each method has on 1) the empathy and trust that listeners feel towards a person sharing a personal story, and 2) a speaker's own perception of being heard, finding that voice conversion is an especially suitable method for our purposes. Our findings open up interesting potential research directions related to anonymous spoken discourse, as well as additional ways of engaging with voice-based civic technologies.

Socio-spatial dynamics of E-participation: A case study of the Mudamos app in João Pessoa (2017–2020)

Emerging civic technologies can support civil society and the state toward participatory democracy. They offer citizens alternative tools for online participation or e-participation. In this study, we explore the socio-spatial dynamics of an e-participation activity in a city's policy-making process through the artifice of the network analyses. We build upon the idea of a network conceived as an object of human action, considering its social, technical, and spatial elements. We propose a conceptual framework to translate the geographic network of an e-participation activity in the city's policy-making process constituted by six dimensions: vocation, technology, institutional design, spatiality, participation, and the deliberative system. The case study applies the framework to the Mudamos application in the city of João Pessoa, in the State of Paraíba, Brazil. This e-participation tool facilitates digital signatures for Citizen Initiative Draft Bills (CIDB). Despite initial technical, institutional, and financial support, the app did not deliver its potential value. The reasons for low adoption are the lack of economic resources, low levels of civic skills, discontinuation of citizen recruitment, and discontinuation of the partnership between the control agents. Furthermore, socio-spatial inequality was critical in users' access and participation. Our findings suggest that the development of state capacities and participatory literacy are crucial to the success of e-participation initiatives. Consequently, the proposed framework and its application serve as a valuable starting point for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand the socio-spatial relationships involved in this process, offering knowledge to address digital inequalities and increase the effectiveness of e-participation initiatives.

Make (digital) space for and with the young: Arts-inspired co-design of civic tech for youth mental health policies

Public engagement, digital or in-person, is mostly adult-centric and ableist, often universalising the experience of participation of a narrow demographic (white, older and middle class). In Mindset Revolution we combined arts-based and creative methods with civic tech to co-design participatory spaces with a diverse group of young people, where to discuss and influence mental health policy and practice. The paper examines the digital element of the project, where young people, supported by a team of academics and digital designers, used the Decidim civic tech platform to engage with their peers and policymakers. This co-design work helped inform changes to the platform towards more accessible and margin-responsive participation that can better support active engagement of traditionally excluded groups. The young people evaluated their own participation and social impact, challenging assumptions about youth participation. The flexibility afforded by the digital platform was crucial to sustain engagement. However, although often branded as digital natives, the young people we worked with perceived digital participation as an enabler but not a central element of their work on social change. Follow-up work on the platform is shaping it as a space for collective oversight, with opportunities for open-ended dialogue between young people, the community and policymakers to identify and navigate barriers to implementation of young people’s proposals.

Dreaming of AI: environmental sustainability and the promise of participation

AbstractThere is widespread consensus among policymakers that climate change and digitalisation constitute the most pressing global transformations shaping human life in the 21st century. Seeking to address the challenges arising at this juncture, governments, technologists and scientists alike increasingly herald artificial intelligence (AI) as a vehicle to propel climate change mitigation and adaptation. In this paper, we explore the intersection of digitalisation and climate change by examining the deployment of AI in government-led climate action. Building on participant observations conducted in the context of the “Civic Tech Lab for Green”—a government-funded public interest AI initiative—and eight expert interviews, we investigate how AI shapes the negotiation of environmental sustainability as an issue of public interest. Challenging the prescribed means–end relationship between AI and environmental protection, we argue that the unquestioned investment in AI curtails political imagination and displaces discussion of climate “problems” and possible “solutions” with “technology education”. This line of argumentation is rooted in empirical findings that illuminate three key tensions in current coproduction efforts: “AI talk vs. AI walk”, “civics washing vs. civics involvement” and “public invitation vs. public participation”. Emphasising the importance of re-exploring the innovative state in climate governance, this paper extends academic literature in science and technology studies that examines public participation in climate change adaptation by shedding light on the emergent phenomenon of public interest AI.

Socio-digital Rural Resilience: An Exploration of Information Infrastructures Within and Across Rural Villages During Covid-19

Access to the internet and digital technology are reported determinants and enablers of social capital and community resilience. However, despite rural areas facing ecological, social, and economic uncertainties across the world, communication technologies and the design of civic technologies in HCI are not designed with the rural in mind. In this paper, we explore information infrastructures within and across rural villages in the UK focusing on the interplay between human, social, and technical infrastructures. We report on the existing communication practices, underlining the impacts of transitioning to digital communication technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings point to the fragility of information infrastructure, the "civic duty" of bridging information and skills gaps, and the role of technology as a threat to social norms and disrupter of the 'politics of the rural'. The work presented here has implications for Rural HCI researchers and designers interested in design from the rural.

What Does 'Failure' Mean in Civic Tech? We Need Continued Conversations About Discontinuation

What Does 'Failure' Mean in Civic Tech? We Need Continued Conversations About Discontinuation

DEPLATFORMING THE SMART CITY: GIVING RESIDENTS CONTROL OVER THEIR PERSONAL DATA

Smart city platforms–encompassing mobile apps, cameras, sensors, algorithms, and predictive analytics—function as surveillance tools. Specifically, these Internet-connected devices and services generate troves of data on residents, including real-time geolocation, energy consumption habits, travel patterns, mobile device identifiers, Internet browsing history, phone contacts, credit card numbers, and much more. The proposed project is focused on the City of Long Beach’s vision to use data in ethical ways that avoid reinforcing existing racial biases and discriminatory decision-making. When fully implemented, this digital rights platform will operationalize both privacy and racial equity as priorities for all deployments of smart city technology. First, the platform will feature text and the open-source iconography that visually conveys how the City of Long Beach uses specific technologies, what data the devices collect and how the City utilizes that data. We plan to strategically deploy these information points across Long Beach, physically adjacent to or digitally embedded within civic technologies, e.g., sensors, cameras, small cells, mobile payment kiosks, and a 311 app. The platform will include a feedback application consisting of access (via QR code or hyperlink) to an online dashboard where users may learn additional details, update data collection preferences, and share comments/concerns with local government officials. The ultimate goal is to develop a backend solution that enables residents to opt-out of data collection. The platform will provide residents with a clear understanding of how local government applies predictive and diagnostic analytics to personal data, and will also empower community members by granting them agency.

Open government, civic tech and digital platforms in Latin America: A governance study of Montevideo's urban app ‘Por Mi Barrio’

AbstractDigital technologies have a recognised potential to build more efficient, credible, and innovative public institutions in Latin America. Despite progress, digital transformation in Latin American governments remains limited. In this work, we explore a peculiar yet largely understudied opportunity in the region: pursuing digital government transformation as a collaborative process between the government and civil society organisations. To do so, we draw from information systems research on digital government and platforms for development, complemented with governance theory from political science and conduct an interpretive in‐depth case study of an urban reporting platform in Montevideo called ‘Por Mi Barrio’. The study reveals three mutually reinforced orders of governance in the trajectory of the project and explain how the collaboration unfolded over time: (i) a technical decision to use open platform architectures; (ii) the negotiation of formal and informal rules to make the project thrive and (iii) a shared, long‐term ideology around the value of open technologies and technical sovereignty grounded in years of political history. Using a contextual explanation approach, our study helps to improve our understanding on the governance of collaborative digital government platforms in Latin America, with specific contributions to practice.

Exploring the campaign space of non-party activism in the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections

In recent years there has been an increase in election-focused activity undertaken by non-party organisations. This activism concerns issues such as political education, cross-party collaboration, voter registration, and voter advice. Using the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections as case studies, we take a strategic action field approach to analyse how this campaign space is developing. We demonstrate the existence of competing logics of activism associated with the fields of social movements, electioneering, and ‘civic tech’. This leads to conflicts related to ethos, time, organisational hybridity, activism, funding and regulation, with such issues frequently shaped by the affordances offered by digital technology. Our findings contribute towards better understandings of how these actors operate in, and attempt to influence, the contemporary electoral landscape.

Mainstreaming civic tech and citizen sensing: a research agenda on co-creation methods, data interfaces, and impact pathways

In this perspective article, we propose an interdisciplinary research agenda that addresses citizen science approaches embedded in civic tech initiatives and citizen sensing scenarios. The proposed agenda builds on the multi-level perspective framework (Geels, 2004; Geels, 2019) to inform research on how such ‘niche innovations’ like citizen sensing become mainstreamed in broader socio-technical systems and modes of governance. To support research across use case scenarios and make analyses more comparable internationally, we identify three core areas of interdisciplinary future research and practice development: 1) uses of co-creation methods to develop project objectives and align stakeholders; 2) designs of interfaces for gathering, communicating, and archiving civic data for different types of users; and 3) modeling impact pathways of individual projects that include civic tech activists and citizen scientists, academic researchers, journalists, and policymakers. For impact pathways, we highlight the importance of collaborations with data-driven approaches in journalism.

Insourcing the smart city: assembling an ideo-technical ecosystem of talent, skills, and civic-mindedness in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article examines an alternative model of smart city formation, one based on the principle of insourcing technical competencies and capabilities to those responsible for city governance. This model counters the logic of technological outsourcing upon which many assumptions and critiques of the smart city rest, and thus reveals ways in which a more generative discourse can be forged. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders from public and private sector organizations, we develop a case study of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. Through coordinated efforts to reorganize the public sector’s technological functions, develop nation-wide skills upgrading programs, and repatriate overseas tech talent, the government strives to assemble an ideo-technical ecosystem of talent, skills, and civic-mindedness in Singapore. This is an ecosystem designed to establish the public sector as the driver of urban innovation, and thus maximize the benefits of “civic tech”.

Sorting a public? Using quali-quantitative methods to interrogate the role of algorithms in digital democracy platforms

ABSTRACT Following concerns about social media’s role in politics (fostering polarization and spreading disinformation), many activists and civic hackers have developed alternative digital democracy platforms for both deliberation and the representation of public opinion. But how are we to study the role of these platforms, and in particular, their algorithms in the development of issues and the publics that gather around them? This article employs a simple quali-quantitative data visualization to study how a particular digital democracy platform, vTaiwan (an implementation of Pol.is – a tool for generating opinions and consensus about public issues) – formats political participation. We investigate how one particular issue (Uber legalization) was formed and reformed by users, moderators, and algorithms on the vTaiwan platform over time. while the algorithm sorted opinions into a binary of pro and anti-Uber positions, we find that the comments themselves and their sequence suggest more nuanced positions and the potential for dialogue. We argue that vTaiwan may be limited by its focus on simple quantitative data points (positive or negative votes as opposed to the texts themselves) and a forced separation of participants into in-or-out opinion groups. This study contributes to critical algorithm studies and digital democracy studies by offering an effective way to analyse the role of algorithms in democratic politics.

Analysis of the Type and Distribution Features of Public Services Based on Civic Tech Concept

Owing to the development of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and the human and financial resources of public institutions, the task of improving public services is increasingly being transferred to the private sector. Civic Tech (CT), a form of public service delivery by ICT professionals in collaboration with citizens, is spreading from the United States to the world and creating many new public services. This study analyzes CT-based public services worldwide by clustering, dimension analysis, and co-occurrence analysis. This study concludes that CT-based public services are generally divided into two forms: direct service delivery to users, which fixes and replaces existing public services, and the creation of generic tools that indirectly support the improvement of public services. Moreover, the fact that the majority of CT-based public services are located in middleincome, medium-population density countries and regions can be a constraint on funding and talent that prevents CT organizations from generating or sustaining the public services created by CT organizations in areas where new and alternative public services are most needed.

Living labs for civic technologies: a case study. Community infrastructuring for a volunteer firefighting service.

Digital technologies are increasingly adopted and developed in living labs, to support and enable co-production processes around wellbeing related public services. This research report presents the case of one of the local laboratories established by the European project NLAB4CIT, in the city of Kaisariani, Greece. In order to enhance community engagement, participatory design methods are applied under an "infrastructuring" notion; the living lab model is reapproached as community infrastructure; and digital tools are understood as civic technologies. The article reports on the initial co-design phases, in order to provide other living labs on digital co-production with an overview on the socio-technical challenges encountered. These challenges concern how community actors can engage in the process of co-production of public services, and how digital technologies can be introduced to this purpose. Strength factors emerge such as the existence of an already active community, the creation of an enduring space of collaboration between researchers and citizens, and a civic approach to technology that makes them accessible and tailored. Open challenges concern the role of the public administration, the extent to which technologies are actually co-designed and co-developed, and some technical issues such as internet accessibility.

Beyond Transactional Democracy: A Study of Civic Tech in Canada

Technologies are increasingly enrolled in projects to involve civilians in the work of policy-making, often under the label of 'civic technology'. But conventional forms of participation through transactions such as voting provide limited opportunities for engagement. In response, some civic tech groups organize around issues of shared concern to explore new forms of democratic technologies. How does their work affect the relationship between publics and public servants? This paper explores how a Civic Tech Toronto creates a platform for civic engagement through the maintenance of an autonomous community for civic engagement and participation that is casual, social, nonpartisan, experimental, and flexible. Based on two years of action research, including community organizing, interviews, and observations, this paper shows how this grassroots civic tech group creates a civic platform that places a diverse range of participants in contact with the work of public servants, helping to build capacities and relationships that prepare both publics and public servants for the work of participatory democracy. The case shows that understanding civic tech requires a lens beyond the mere analysis or production of technical artifacts. As a practice for making technologies that is social and participatory, civic tech creates alternative modes of technology development and opportunities for experimentation and learning, and it can reconfigure the roles of democratic participants.

Open Data Intermediaries: Motivations, Barriers and Facilitators to Engagement

Open data programs have become increasingly established at national and local levels of government. While the degree of success these programs have had in achieving their objectives remains open to question, one factor that has been identified as important to any success is the role of open data intermediaries, individuals and organizations that help others to make use of open data. In this paper we investigate how people become engaged with open data, what their motivations are, and the barriers and facilitators program participants perceive with regard to using open data effectively. We interview participants from a variety of backgrounds with differing levels of experience and engagement with open data. Participants include students learning how to train others in open data techniques and tools; people who attend open data events and use open data for commercial or social benefit; and representatives from local government, municipal agencies and a civic tech non-profit. We identify pathways to successfully developing and nurturing a community of open data intermediaries, and make five recommendations for organizations planning and managing open data programs.

Public, libre, commons: On the logics, logistics and locations of democratic participation in the digital age

This paper tells the story of Decide Madrid (Decide), a civic tech platform designed by Madrid’s municipality in 2015 in the spirit of the autonomous and hacker philosophies that spearheaded the Spanish Occupy or 15M movement. We develop a biographical account of Decide to show how the design of the platform was modified over the course of four years to accommodate shifting ideas of how digital infrastructures can channel, both online and offline, the social energies and technical rationalities of political participation. In particular, we identify three design assemblages of democratic participation: the public, the libre and the commons, whose orientations and configurations sometimes share, and sometimes diffract, different logics, logistics and locations of where and how democracy ought to be activated in the digital age. We further show how over time these modulations cultivated a view of democratic culture as an experimental process.

Access to information research in the digital era

Access to information research in the digital era

Review on HR digitalization and artificial intelligence contributing to smart cities

This paper aims to identify the research trends on digitalisation contributing to smart cities and the role of technology in economic and social development. Review Methodology is taken up for knowledge development in the area of digital Human Resources Management in line with AI and technology-enabled smart cities. The quality assessment of the review sample is validated through a mixed methods appraisal tool (MMAT). The review conceptualises “Smart Cities” as mainly supply-side and sector-driven, giving the private sector a lead role in problem identification and digital solution facilitating citizens with quick-service delivery. At the heart of digitalisation around smart cities is sustainableefficient- livable urban living. The key terms by peak frequency using Voyant Tools link to “HR Digitalisation” and “Smart City” includes the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced energy storage technologies, civic technology, crewless aerial vehicles (drones) and Blockchain as an emerging technology with a substantial presence in smart cities.