Towards Smart Riyadh : Riyadh Wiki Information and Complaining System

Abstract

In the past ten years, the role of citizens to achieve smart city vision is realized and the people-centric Smart City model has been stressed. In this paper, we propose “Riyadh Wiki Information and Complaining System” for citizen engagement in Riyadh city in Saudi Arabia. The system follows the crowd sourcing approach by allowing citizens to act as sources of data to support the government and to improve their city. It also follows the co-design approach by being an open source platform that allows citizens to cooperate to build the system and add new services. The system aims at enhancing citizens’ life and solving governmental issues like transparency, trust, decision-making, and accountability in a cheap way. It is developed as a web-based wiki system, so it can be used easily by the non-skilled citizens while allowing skilled citizens to add new features, functionalities, and new services. It supports both Arabic and English languages and exploits the widespread of social media to attract more citizens. Initial evaluations using e-participation assessment, web accessibility and web usability evaluation techniques have been carried out and the results show the effectiveness of the system.