Cities are engines for economic growth, innovation, and change. Throughout human history, the greatest civilizations were centered around cities rather than nations, facilitating the flourishing of trade, sciences and the arts- things which have come to shape entire national identities today. It’s for these opportunities of economic, cultural, intellectual and social development that urban societies have boomed in the developed world and people continue to leave their agrarian rural life to move to settle in cities across the developing world, even today.
How Citizen Engagement Reporting App grooming citizens lifestyle?
Technology also provides a new dimension to urban development, which has often been overlooked by government, and businesses, the engagement and participation of citizens. Citizen engagement through virtual interaction like mobile application, and discussion is, therefore, central to urban development in the age of smartphones and digital technology. The following viewpoints are how citizen engagement app grooming citizens lifestyle:
1.Citizen Empowerment: Citizen groups know best what their respective communities need. If they feel that through technology, their voices will be heard and taken into consideration as an important aspect in the development planning stage, then they will be encouraged to proactively use such media to bring to attention local issues and provide suggestions for solutions. More importantly, it will make sure that the economically, socially or physically disadvantaged citizens get a voice and development projects are inclusive of these disadvantaged sections.
2.Collaborative Development: Social media and city-wide apps provide opportunities for collective brainstorming and innovation to achieve development objectives. A robust IT framework and an active and receptive civil society or municipal body can encourage talented citizens (who normally wouldn’t care to get involved) to ideate and come up with out-of-the-box propositions. Also, procurement and resource utilization will involve local supply chains and validated by citizens. All such efforts will lead to creating a buzz around development projects among the citizenry, leading to an investment of social capital into urban development.
3.Awareness Creation: While citizens being encouraged to participate in the development of their localities is one of the objectives of smart development, technology can also work the other way around to make citizens more informative about developmental aspects and global trends and best practices. This can be enabled through regular feeds of snippets of information to citizens who subscribe to a city-wide app or social media pages of the city or localities. The benefits of smart cities need to be understood by citizens to be appreciated and foster collaboration between them and the municipal bodies.
4.Open Data: Citizens need to be able to access data about facilities and planned developments in their localities to validate or contribute to the same or simply to cater to their ‘right to know’. This calls for robust data collection and management systems working on a real-time basis. Data needs to be shared unhindered between city-wide organizations and departments (public and private) for a more holistic and justifiable open data framework, which provides actionable data. However, care must be taken to incorporate privacy into the setup so that data can be accessed safely and integrity of the system is not compromised. After all, the government/municipal body is the custodian of the data and they are responsible for regulating its access and usage.
5.Service Provisions: Normal urban services like paying electricity, water and cellphone bills, parking fees, finding directions or information about history or restaurants etc. in a particular locality can be enabled through digital kiosks. These can be designed by taking into account locality-based or pan-city suggestions for features to be incorporated, including smart cards or card-based payment facilities.
If you are looking for the best citizen engagement application, Take a look at our Citizen Engagement Reporting Application with the City of Ontario, California in Spring 2018. Since its release, the myOntario app (iOS / Android) has proven to be a huge success for the city, allowing better interaction between the city and its citizens.
If you want to know more about Civita App or try it for yourself, Contact us and Book a free demo.
