A Feasibility Study on Crowdsourcing to Monitor Municipal Resources in Smart Cities

Abstract

Active citizenry, whereby citizens actively participate in reporting and addressing challenges in urban service delivery is a strategic goal of smart cities such as Singapore. In spite of the promise, we believe that the success of such large-scale nation-wide crowdsourcing deployments depend on the real-word user preferences and behavioral characteristics of citizens. In this paper, we first present our findings on behavioral preferences and key concerns of citizens regarding smart-city services via an opinion survey conducted with 1300 participants. We then propose a "citizen-controlled" urban services reporting platform where citizens actively report on the status of various municipal resources. We advocate the importance of matching user mobility patterns against task locations to make the platform more efficient (i.e., higher task completion rate and lower detour overhead).