Data-Based Civic Participation

Within the past five years, a new form of technology-mediated public participation that experiments with crowdsourced data production in place of community dis-course has emerged. Examples of this class of system in-clude SeeClickFix, PublicStuff, and Street Bump, each of which mediate feedback about local neighborhood issues and help communities mobilize resources to address those issues. The experiments being playing out by this new class of services are derived from a form of public partici-pation built on the ideas of smart cities where residents and physical environments are instrumented to provide data to improve operational efficiency and sustainability (Caragliu, Del Bo, and Nijkamp 2011). Ultimately, smart cities is the application to local government all the effi-ciencies that computing has always promised—efficiencie