Opening Smart Cities
Challenges to engage citizens through information systems

This half-day workshop is done as a pre-conference workshop for the 25th Annual European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2017) (http://www.ecis2017.eu).


Call for Submission

Current trends in urban development are rapidly increasing and focusing towards the deployment of smart strategies, and technologies attempting to involve citizens directly in the decision-making processes. Investment from public and private sectors is being directed to this aspect. The growing number of examples of abandoned or obsolete Smart-City platforms and tools due to their lack of use by the citizens are calling for “wiser” approach (more social, open, and inclusive). An ideal strategy will be to evaluate and address issues regarding citizens’ involvement during the planning, designing, and decision-making stages in the process of building “smart cities.” The objective of this workshop is to explore and discuss the potential of information systems to engage citizens in the development of smart cities through e-participation technologies.

We invite you to submit your short papers (max. 2000 words excluding references) based on your experience, research or idea to promote “wise” approaches for e-participation platforms or citizens’ participation strategies in Smart Cities. The “wiser” the e-participation technologies, the bigger the contributions from the citizens to build a smarter city. Submissions are due on April 3, 2017. Notifications will be done by April 26, 2017.

This workshop is developed with the support of the “GEO-C – Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities” (H2020- MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement Number 642332, http://www.geo-c.eu/ ), which aims aims to contribute methods and tools to realize smart and open cities, in which all groups of society can participate on all levels and benefit in many ways.


Topics

During this half-day workshop a presentation session will be follow-up by a discussion roundtable, and a brainstorming session for new “wise” approaches for e-participation platforms in a smart city context. The Opening Smart Cities workshop will discuss, but not be limited to, the following workshop topics and themes:

E-participation in smart cities
Citizen engagement platforms in smart cities
Open data and governance towards open and inclusive cities
Participatory and critical design in urban decision-making processes
New kinds of interaction between citizens and other stakeholders in open cities
Different performance of citizens on using ICT for e-participation: gender, age, education, etc
Reflections for e-participation: Best practices, failures & practical challenges.


Organizers

The workshop will be organized and managed by members from the three European Universities part of the “Geo-C – Enabling Open Cities” project (www.geo-c.eu) team. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact us (E-mail: geoc3.ecis@gmail.com) .

Registration and Short papers submission

Registration for the Opening Smart Cities 2017 workshop will be handled directly with your registration for the ECIS 2017 conference. The registration fee for this workshop can be paid through the conference registration system.

Please submit your short paper stating the name of the authors, contact details and affiliation of prospective contributions to geoc3.ecis@gmail.com. Please do not hesitate to ask us if you have further questions.