Opening Smart cities: challenges to engage citizens through information systems – ECIS workshop

To organize a scientific event in the form of a workshop as part of the 25th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). ESR 01,03,04,05,06,13 and 15 gathered in Guimaraes – Portugal to discuss the topic of “Opening Smart cities: challenges to engage citizens through information systems.”

The workshop aimed to allow space for the participants and organizers to reflect on current smart cities practices and their challenges, and possible ways to address them. It was particularly emphasized by the call that the participants considered and proposed over the importance of effective citizen engagement strategies and platforms within the smart cities’ context.

Different activities took place during the workshop: presentation session and brainstorming session. The presentations covered a broad range of topics (citizen engagement, privacy from the smart city’s point of view, participatory budget and transformation of smart and sustainable cities). After the presentations, an interactive session was built on the group discussion and brainstorming. The topics included “IoT & Privacy in smart cities,” “Openness in smart cities: challenges and impact” and “Sense of place to promote participation in smart cities.” Participants were divided into two groups, and finally, they all agreed on common issues concerning the participation of citizens in city contexts such as isolation, exclusion and lack of participation.

More information on the workshop can be found here:

http://www.ecis2017.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ECIS2017-OSC.pdf

Pictures of the workshop:

 

The paper “Citizense – A generic user-oriented participatory sensing framework” has been accepted for publication in the International Conference on Selected topics in MoWNet’17

This paper, written by Ngo Manh Khoi, Luis E. Rodríguez-Pupo and Sven Casteleyn, described the general architecture of a generic participatory sensing framework that incorporates useful functionalities such as context-aware sensing, incentives for participants, an interactive dashboard for managing the content of the sensing campaign and viewing the results. The mobile client app (in Android) can also function as an offline data collecting tool.

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Geo-C posters at the VGI COST Energic Final conference at the RGS

img_20161014_122548A poster session is the right place to not only perform several times your elevator speech but also explain the abstract model of your research printed in an A1 paper sheet. Then after few times you find that your idea also inspires someone else and that short presentation became a chat with coffee and biscuits, at that time you realize your poster session was successful.

That was our sensation last October at the Royal Geographical Society in London, where we were invited to the closing meeting of the COST Energic Action IC1203 (European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing). Our two poster among 15 were visited and commented with multiple researchers, we also received multiple opinions, feedback from our ideas as well as invitations for visiting research teams for contrasting existing developments to improve ourselves.

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