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The Role of Digital Technologies in Promoting Smart City Governance
Abstract
This paper presents the analysis of the SmartGov project as a case of smart technologies application, such as expert-based Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, social media applications and open data, to promote citizen engagement and support decision-making. The objective of this paper is to analyze the role of digital technologies as inputs to achieve smart city governance. The main results are illustrated in a framework that combines the smart city governance elements in a real case description.
... The intelligent and digital vocabulary was originally used to describe advanced cities [4] [5]. The use of ICT-based technology gives special emphasis as one of its buffers [2] [8]. ...
... Other research results also reinforce the idea that smart governance has a very significant role in the implementation of smart city [8] [12]. The division of roles has been performed equally in the governance process, all stakeholders participating in ensuring the success of the program [11] [15]. ...
The complexity of the problem in cities requires disruption and innovative solutions. Improving the quality of life of a city's citizen with the percentage of people living in urban areas continues to grow to be the big goal of Smart City. Implementation problems of smart city still found in Indonesia, from 25 cities appointed to run smart city program in the year 2017, not entirely reach the target. The evaluation was conducted on 15 cities that are considered ready to go smart city. The result is more than 51% of smart governance activity assessed through the implementation of e-government system, has been run by these cities. This research proves smart governance as a critical factor in successful implementation of smart city. This contribution provides important benefits for every decision maker and policy in government if they want to run smart city in his city. And also the reference cities that can be used as an example in achieving the successful implementation of smart city in Indonesia.
... Researchers have investigated smart city governance mainly in smart governance approaches [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14], and little research covered ICT governance for smart cities [15]. There has not been a systematic effort to understand such city-level governance initiatives and how ICT city governance is designed, planned, implemented, and monitored to achieve better cities' performance and responsiveness [16]. Thus, there is a gap research concerning ICT governance in smart cities, mainly in: (i) establishing governance and management standards and regulatory frameworks [17]; (ii) developing a research-practice connection with practitioners regarding ICT as a meta-factor [11] [18]; (iii) extending the findings into management implications and recommendations for mayors, city managers, and practitioners [11]; (iv) achieving cities goals by ensuring stakeholders' needs and drivers [18] [19] [20] [21]; and (v) applying ICT governance practices in smart cities context [20]. ...
... This study brought into practice a set of insights for academics and practitioners in the areas of smart city projects, IT governance, [40], and drawing this concept from a well-established and more concrete ICT governance literature demonstrated to be an interesting domain of study and promising research led to practice. Smart city relies on a high complex environment [5], in which public managers should apply governance and management practices in their daily city operations and as a strategic driver, so that it would be able to provide public value from citizens' perspectives [16] [19] [20] [21]. The Brazilian smart city context, compared to Europe and other developed countries, is still at the beginning. ...
... The first entails a sort of commitment to various values-e.g., social and ethnic plurality, and creativity, as well as cosmopolitanism, and an altruistic engagement with civic participation [21]. The second has placed greater focus on developing collaborations across communities and businesses, brokered by local government to create integrated initiatives with a resident-driven approach [9,22,23]. In both cases, enabling and activating smart citizens or developing smart government, there is a shift in focus away from the commandand-control monitoring of city services, to a focus rooted in resident empowerment across civic sectors [9,24]. ...
Notions of the smart city look to mobilize information technology to increase organizational efficiency, and more recently, to support new forms of community engagement and involvement in addressing municipal issues. As cities turn to civic enterprise technology platforms, we need to better understand how that class of system might be positioned and used to collaborate with informal community-born coalitions. Beginning in 2019, we undertook an embedded collaborative research project in Albany Georgia, a small rural city, to understand three primary research questions: (1) How do community organizing practices take shape around joint initiatives with local government? (2) What data, tools, and process are needed to support those initiatives? (3) How do the affordances of City-run enterprise platforms support such community-born initiatives? To develop insight into these questions, we deployed a mixed-methods study that interwove participant observation, qualitative fieldwork, and participatory workshops. From this, we point to several mismatches that arose between the assumptions of a managed enterprise environment and the complex needs of establishing and supporting a multiparty community coalition.
... • Smart city is concept of development and implementation of ICT as a complex interaction among system that established before [26]. • Smart City is use of ICT-based technology that giving a special emphasis as one of its buffers [27]. ...
The implementation of smart governance in government policies and practices is criticised for its dominant focus on technology investments, which leads to a rather technocratic and corporate way of ‘smartly’ governing cities and less consideration of actual user needs. To help prevent a mismatch between the demand for and the supply of technology, this paper explores what smart governance can learn from efforts in debates on planning support systems to close the ‘PSS implementation gap’. This gap refers to a long-standing discrepancy between the availability of planning support systems (supply) and the time-bound support needs of planning practice (demand). By exploring both the academic field of smart governance and the debates on the planning support system implementation gap, this paper contributes to the further development of smart governance by learning from the experiences in the planning support system debates. Two particular lessons are distilled: (1) for technology to be of added value to practice, it should be attuned to the wishes and capabilities of the intended users and to the specifics of the tasks to be accomplished, given the particularities of the context in which the technology is applied; and (2) closing the planning support system implementation gap reveals that knowledge on the context specificities is of utmost importance and will also be of importance to the smart governance developments. In conclusion, smart governance can and should become more aware of the role of contextual factors in collaboration with users and urban issues. This is expected to shift the emphasis from today’s technology-focused, supply-driven smart governance development, to a socio-technical, application-pulled and demand-driven smart governance development.
This policy brief provides practical recommendations
for governments, especially at the local level, to overcome
these challenges and make effective use of social media and other social networking sites for communication and collaboration purposes. The recommendations are based on a thorough review of relevant
academic literature and interviews with the SmartGov Project pilot cities.
This study addresses the concept of smart governance in the context of smart cities, with a focus on analyzing the phenomenon of smart collaboration. Relying on the existing collaboration and participation concepts in the smart city domain, an empirical analysis was undertaken of how ICT can promote collaborative governance and increase the participation and engagement in government. The multiple case studies focus on three cities in Brazil that run municipal operations centers in an effort to “become smarter”: Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and Belo Horizonte. Interviews with directors, managers, and technicians shed light on the contribution that ICT makes in promoting an environment of collaboration in the government. The findings have revealed that ICT has an important role in supporting information sharing and integration between government agencies and external stakeholders, including citizens, especially in developing countries.
Purpose
Many governments are working toward a vision of government-wide transformation that strives to achieve an open, transparent and accountable government while providing responsive services. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the concept of transparency-by-design to advance open government.
Design/methodology/approach
The opening of data, the deployment of tools and instruments to engage the public, collaboration among public organizations and between governments and the public are important drivers for open government. The authors review transparency-by-design concepts.
Findings
To successfully achieve open government, fundamental changes in practice and new research on governments as open systems are needed. In particular, the creation of “transparency-by-design” is a key aspect in which transparency is a key system development requirement, and the systems ensure that data are disclosed to the public for creating transparency.
Research limitations/implications
Although transparency-by-design is an intuitive concept, more research is needed in what constitutes information and communication technology-mediated transparency and how it can be realized.
Practical implications
Governments should embrace transparency-by-design to open more data sets and come closer to achieving open government.
Originality/value
Transparency-by-design is a new concept that has not given any attention yet in the literature.
Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.
Most of the definitions of a “smart city” make a direct or indirect reference to improving performance as one of the main objectives of initiatives to make cities “smarter”. Several evaluation approaches and models have been put forward in literature and practice to measure smart cities. However, they are often normative or limited to certain aspects of cities’ “smartness”, and a more comprehensive and holistic approach seems to be lacking. Thus, building on a review of the literature and practice in the field, this paper aims to discuss the importance of adopting a holistic approach to the assessment of smart city governance and policy decision making. It also proposes a performance assessment framework that overcomes the limitations of existing approaches and contributes to filling the current gap in the knowledge base in this domain. One of the innovative elements of the proposed framework is its holistic approach to policy evaluation. It is designed to address a smart city’s specificities and can benefit from the active participation of citizens in assessing the public value of policy decisions and their sustainability over time. We focus our attention on the performance measurement of codesign and coproduction by stakeholders and social innovation processes related to public value generation. More specifically, we are interested in the assessment of both the citizen centricity of smart city decision making and the processes by which public decisions are implemented, monitored, and evaluated as regards their capability to develop truly “blended” value services—that is, simultaneously socially inclusive, environmentally friendly, and economically sustainable.
Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, smart people or smart collaboration as the defining features of smart cities, (2) a transformative or incremental perspective on changes in urban governance, (3) better outcomes or a more open process as the legitimacy claim for smart city governance. We argue for a comprehensive perspective: smart city governance is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of ICTs to obtain better outcomes and more open governance processes. Research into smart city governance could benefit from previous studies into success and failure factors for e-government and build upon sophisticated theories of socio-technical change. This article highlights that smart city governance is not a technological issue: we should study smart city governance as a complex process of institutional change and acknowledge the political nature of appealing visions of socio-technical governance.
Points for practitioners
The study provides practitioners with an in-depth understanding of current debates about smart city governance. The article highlights that governing a smart city is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of information and communication technologies. City managers should realize that technology by itself will not make a city smarter: building a smart city requires a political understanding of technology, a process approach to manage the emerging smart city and a focus on both economic gains and other public values.
‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.
Social media monitoring is gradually becoming a common practice in public organizations in the Netherlands. The main purposes of social media monitoring are strategic control and responsiveness. Social media monitoring poses normative questions in terms of transparency, accountability and privacy. We investigate practices of social media monitoring in four Dutch public organizations. Policy departments seem to be more strongly orientated towards monitoring, whereas organizations involved in policy implementation seem to be more inclined to progress to webcare. The paper argues for more transparency on social media monitoring.
Companies have realized they need to hire data scientists, academic institutions are scrambling to put together data science programs, and publications are touting data science as a hot -- even "sexy" -- career choice. However, there is confusion about what exactly data science is, and this confusion could lead to disillusionment as the concept diffuses into meaningless buzz. In this paper we argue that there are good reasons why it has been hard to pin down exactly what data science is. One reason is that data science is intricately intertwined with other important concepts also of growing importance, such as big data and data-driven decision making. Another reason is the natural tendency to associate what a practitioner does with the definition of the practitioner's field; this can result in overlooking the fundamentals of the field. We believe that trying to define the boundaries of Data Science precisely right now is not of the utmost importance. We can debate the boundaries of the field in an academic setting, but in order for data science to serve business effectively, it is important (i) to understand its relationships to other important related concepts, and (ii) to begin to identify the fundamental principles underlying data science. Once we embrace (ii) we can much better understand and explain exactly what data science has to offer. Furthermore, only once we embrace (ii) should we be comfortable calling it data science. In this paper we present a perspective that addresses all these things. We close by offering as examples a partial list of fundamental principles underlying data science.
In the last years, several research endeavors were launched aiming at involving popular social media platforms in electronic
participation. These early endeavors seem to present some essential limitations related mainly to scalability and uptake.
In order to avoid these limitations, we introduce a two-phased approach for supporting participatory decision-making based
on the integration and analysis of social and government open data. The proposed approach is based on the literature related
to the analysis of massive amounts of social data for future events prediction. In this paper we also present a Web data driven
architecture for the implementation of the proposed approach. The architecture is based on the use of linked data paradigm
as a layer that will enable integration of data from different sources. We anticipate that the proposed approach will (i)
allow decision makers to understand and predict public opinion and reaction about specific decisions; and (ii) enable citizens
to inadvertently contribute in decision-making.
We examine the nature of Collaborative Networked Organizations in Government (CNO-G) and identify three core capabilities
characterising such organizations - Partnership, Coordination and Integration. By considering these capabilities as idioms
for the CNO-G domain, we define a conceptual model that expresses such capabilities using modeling abstractions provided by
ARCON (A Reference Model for Collaborative Networks). Finally, we illustrate the resulting domain-specific modelling framework
through the example of a concrete CNO-G aimed at delivering a seamless public service.
Many of the challenges to be faced by smart cities surpass the capacities, capabilities, and reaches of their traditional institutions and their classical processes of governing, and therefore new and innovative forms of governance are needed to meet these challenges. According to the network governance literature, governance models in public administrations can be categorized through the identification and analysis of some main dimensions that govern in the way of managing the city by governments. Based on prior research and on the perception of city practitioners in European smart cities, this paper seeks to analyze the relevance of main dimensions of governance models in smart cities. Results could shed some light regarding new future research on efficient patterns of governance models within smart cities.
Today’s politicians are confronted with new information technologies to tackle complex decision-making problems. In order to make sustainable decisions, a profound analysis of societal problems and possible solutions (policy options) needs to be performed. In this policy-analysis process, different stakeholders are involved. Besides internal direct advisors of the policy makers (policy analysts), external experts from different scientific disciplines can support evidence-based decision making. Despite the alleged importance of scientific advice in the policy-making process, it is observed that scientific results are often not used. In this work, a concept is described that supports the collaboration between scientists and politicians. We propose a science-policy interface that is realized by including information visualization in the policy-analysis process. Therefore, we identify synergy effects between both fields and introduce a methodology for addressing the current challenges of science-policy interfaces with visualization. Finally, we describe three exemplary case studies carried out in European research projects that instantiate the concept of this approach.
Trust/distrust in the citizens of a foreign country may affect the nation's strategic decisions to continue/discontinue security cooperation with the foreign country. This paper employs Twitter data to examine the impact of government surveillance disclosures on bilateral trust and international security cooperation. This study demonstrates the impact of social media on possible trust and security cooperation between two countries. Social network analysis method captures emergent patterns of bilateral trust-related communications. In the aftermath of the disclosures on Australia's secret surveillance of Indonesian government leaders, Indonesian citizens used Twittersphere via #ganyangaustralia (“Crush Australia”) to mobilize online political activism against Australia for its perceived injustice and lack of transparency in security policy. Our social network analysis of Twitter data shows evidence that citizens' distrust could affect bilateral security cooperation negatively. Unilaterally, Indonesia decided to halt Indonesia–Australia cross-border security cooperation. More generally, we highlight the need for new citizen-centric e-governance mechanisms for open and transparent international communications on government surveillance policies to safeguard the potential fragility of bilateral trust, when cross-border security cooperation generates discernible mutual benefits.
This paper examines public opinion on National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance programs of Americans. A new theory, developed and tested in this paper, explicates the effect of political efficacy on creating greater citizen-centric e-governance. Its propositions state that the higher citizens' perceived self-efficacy in political knowledge and the higher citizens' perceived fairness of government procedures and outcomes, the more engaged citizens would be in using technology for better governance and the more vocal in their views on NSA surveillance programs. This paper adopts a multi-method research approach to examine citizens' approval/disapproval of NSA surveillance programs: (1) critical discourse analysis of tweets exchanged among citizens and interest groups in Twittersphere and (2) logistic regression analysis of survey data collected from a random sample public opinion poll of Americans. The findings of both analyses provide evidence that citizens hold strong views toward NSA surveillance programs. These findings indicate that government needs to be more efficacious in communicating about surveillance programs more transparently to garner greater citizens' approval for its surveillance programs. The findings also provide preliminary evidence for good explanatory power of the theory of citizen-centric e-governance. The theory explains effectively the relationship between government practicing greater political efficacious behavior and citizens engaging in more citizen-centric e-governance in governing government surveillance programs for a better balance between security and privacy.
The concept of smart city is getting more and more relevant for both academics and policy makers. Despite this, there is still confusion about what a smart city is, as several similar terms are often used interchangeably. This paper aims at clarifying the meaning of the word “smart” in the context of cities through an approach based on an in-depth literature review of relevant studies as well as official documents of international institutions. It also identifies the main dimensions and elements characterizing a smart city. The different metrics of urban smartness are reviewed to show the need for a shared definition of what constitutes a smart city, which are its features, and how it performs in comparison to traditional cities. Furthermore, performance measures and initiatives in a few smart cities are identified.
This study proposes a new typological framework for classifying smart city services. Intentionally focused on citizen-centricity, away from bureaucratic perspectives that most typologies have taken, this typology is derived from marketing and service science literature. The proposed typology consists of four dimensions: mode of technology (automate–informative–transformative), purpose of service (hedonic–utilitarian), service authority (voluntary–mandatory), and delivery mode (passive–interactive). This typological framework is validated with a qualitative exercise of classifying inventories of actual smart city services in practice into the framework. Exercise results revealed that the categories provided are mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive in general, and useful in further conceptualization of new services by identifying gaps in reality. In practice, this typology would be useful in positioning specific smart city service under development in terms of citizen-centricity. Urban planners and administrators may use this framework in understanding the pattern of their service development. Also, this framework may provide a useful guideline for service designer pinpointing the design characteristics of old and new smart city services from the perspective of users and customers of city services: citizens.
Scholars and practitioners argue that the most important interactions between citizens and government happen at the local level. These relationships could become closer and more frequent with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In fact, portals could be seen not only as channels for providing government information and services, but also as powerful tools to exchange information and knowledge between different social actors and government entities and to enable participation in collective decision-making efforts about important public affairs. For instance, social media and other Web 2.0 tools could provide new electronic channels for these interactions through their inclusion in local government portals. This paper argues that although important modifications to the organizational and institutional frameworks would be necessary, the potential for local electronic governance through networks of government and non-government actors via internet portals is clearly present. However, a very important first step would be the inclusion of more interaction, participation, and collaboration mechanisms in government portals. Similar to previous efforts with data from the U.S., this paper describes the results of a recent assessment of local government portals in Mexico. The conclusion is that progress toward citizen engagement is slow in local governments and there are very few efforts to increase interaction, participation, and collaboration channels on their portals. Most of them are still following the vision of information and services providers and a local electronic governance model is still in its very initial stages. It seems that e-government in municipalities is still more rhetoric and less reality, at least in some countries.
How can electronic governance (e-governance) assist in helping cities make better decisions and become more competitive, as well as engaging with citizens in democratic activities and decision-making processes? This paper suggests that e-governance may provide a new vehicle for the emerging 'smart city'. The paper assesses the conceptual landscape for city e-governance, with a focus placed on how cities can foster collaborative digital environments to enable local competitiveness and prosperity through knowledge networks and partnerships, integrated e-services and e-participation. Drawing from the literature and the results of a comprehensive survey study in 12 European cities, we put forward a series of propositions on the future of e-city governance in Europe and the implications for strategic policy innovations to foster smart cities.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper (editorial) is to introduce a collection of “best papers,” selected from the 11th International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o, 2010), that are devoted to the technical, managerial, social and policy challenges and issues of collaborative e-government. It provides a conceptual model for collaborative e-government that may be used to explain the motivations and findings behind these studies. Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines a conceptual model of collaborative e-government using value-driven, citizen-driven, cost-driven and technology-driven forces that tie together various e-government collaboration projects. A brief survey of government collaboration projects is presented and a set of research questions on collaborative e-government are formulated. Findings – The conceptual model of e-government collaboration forces provides a framework that encompasses the research questions, topics and themes addressed in various digital government papers, especially those in this issue. Originality/value – The paper introduces and summarizes seven research papers relative to the theme of e-government collaborations, identifying a set of research challenges, opportunities, and unique solutions drawing on past experiences.
Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) are fuzzy-graph structures for representing causal reasoning. Their fuzziness allows hazy degrees of causality between hazy causal objects (concepts). Their graph structure allows systematic causal propagation, in particular forward and backward chaining, and it allows knowledge bases to be grown by connecting different FCMs. FCMs are especially applicable to soft knowledge domains and several example FCMs are given. Causality is represented as a fuzzy relation on causal concepts. A fuzzy causal algebra for governing causal propagation on FCMs is developed. FCM matrix representation and matrix operations are presented in the Appendix.
Report on the Impacts of Open Data
- Viale Pereira
- G Virkar
- S Albrecht
- V Parycek
Viale Pereira G., Virkar S., Albrecht V., Parycek P. 2017. Report on the Impacts
of
Open
Data.
Bundeskanzleramt,
Vienna.
https://www.data.gv.at/katalog/dataset/ff51457a-2c9f-4553-b5f0-ea10a0c71119/resource/cf99ede9-fa36-4fc4-9075-404d7215696f/download/171031ogdimpactsberichta4.pdf
Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance
- A Meijer
- Mpr Bolívar
Meijer A, Bolívar MPR. 2016. Governing the smart city: a review of the
literature on smart urban governance. International Review of Administrative
Sciences, 82, 2, 392-408. DOI:10.1177/0020852314564308
