New publication: IntelCities project report

Lahti, P., J. Kangasoja & al. Eds. (2006): Electronic and Mobile Participation in City Planning and Management. Experiences from IntelCities – an Integrated Project of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union. Cases Helsinki, Tampere, Garðabær/Reykjavik and Frankfurt. City of Helsinki Urban Facts, Helsinki.

The report is based on the experiences gained in the IntelCities project focusing on novel electronic and mobile participation concepts for e-governance. IntelCities was one of the first Integrated Projects (IP) in European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme (through the IST programme) and it brought together 74 European partners including 18 cities, 20 ICT companies (including Nokia, Microsoft and Cisco) and 36 research groups. It started in 2004 and ended at the end of 2005 with a total budget of 11.7 M€.

Residents are willing and capable to create and participate

Residents and other users are prepared and willing to create common contents or services. Local news, information contents and services have a clear market potential but residents and other users need to see value benefits for their own community. The implementations (both soft- and hardware) must be carefully designed and well tested from the usability perspective and before “live” Living Lab tests. New services should be well introduced and supported by the local actors. Voluntary, bottom-up and local types of social and business innovations (like e-moderators or local service company ADC in Arabianranta) could be more broadly introduced within different parts of participation procedures.

Small local business models have to be created to support sustainable service creation

Top-down generic services are not meeting specific local needs. Connected localness would offer a model to exchange small business models and innovations and would create more feasible ways for content and service creation. Innovative e/m-participation concepts and service models have a clear market potential. The experience from this work package confirmed the prevalent conventional wisdom concerning adaptability, accessibility and acceptability of participation tools. e-Participation should be adapted to the needs and skills of the users by a tailored mix of technologies, procedures, or methods embedded into the existing institutional structures including strategic considerations of the target groups or initiators.

Promising future visions are justified

The use of various information tools and services is becoming an integral aspect of all functions of local governance. It is likely that the development of services and applications will continue to be in nature emergent, dispersed, taking place in various projects and organized by changing constellations of partnerships. Open architectures and standards ensure that development efforts produce sustainable and cumulating results that can be easily shared among cities. The municipal systems and practices of planning and decision making need to be actively developed hand in hand with the user applications, since citizen feedback and contribution by various channels does not happen by adding technology but by transforming existing practices.

The new e/m-participation concepts, services and tools can increase the citizen participation in all sectors of local decision making. The market is still underdeveloped and there is a lot of room for new initiatives. This justifies endeavours that support development of new technological, economical and social innovations, which can improve electronic and mobile participation in urben development.

Links to developed web applications:

“My Community” Citizen Portal from Iceland

eConsultation tool Arkkikone from Tampere

“Election Star” Election Engine from Helsinki

“Election Star” Election Engine from Helsinki (in Finnish)

“In the Hood”, demo of a profiling tool from Arabianranta Helsinki

The whole report in PDF

Other reports from the project available at IntelCities web site