Publishing data on city portals as Open Data is a growing trend, also promoted by the EC. However, in most cases it is only raw dump of data. It is hard for laymen to interpret the data sets, yet even impossible to determine if the content is useable as mostly no meta-information is given. These challenges were addressed by the smarticipate consortium and its solutions developed.
The smarticipate project developed ICT tools for participatory applications, using Open Data and other datasets. These applications enable citizens to co-create, to co-design and to take informed decisions by getting feedback on their innovative participatory applications. Furthermore, citizens can share their ideas and opinions and thus enrich existing Open Data.
In this respect, smarticipate’s three pilot cities Rome, Hamburg and London (Royal Boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea) actively contributed to smarticipate’s applications and data acquisition.
The overall objectives were:
• To enable structured interaction between authorities and citizens/businesses via the smarticipate communication platform
• To improve the information flow in the cities
• To create smarticipate applications, implementing automatic feedback technology
• To generate conditions for innovative authorities’ service provision
• To ensure the usefulness and market relevance for the targeted audience through piloting
• To establish pan-European dissemination and feedback loops
• To assist stakeholders in impact assessment for planned actions and analysis
The project followed a rigorous development process which began with the identification of the cities’ needs, gathering of their requirements and the definition of Urban Stories.
The commercialization partner are jointly exploiting the opportunity to establish a spin-off based on the project results, in order to provide the platform and the services to other cities.
