CITY FEED: A Pilot System of Citizen-Sourcing for City Issue Management

• Published in: ACM transactions on intelligent systems and technology 2016-07, Vol.7 (4), p.1-25
• Main Authors: You, Linlin, Motta, Gianmario, Liu, Kaixu, Ma, Tianyi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2157-6904; 2157-6912
• DOI: 10.1145/2873064

Crowdsourcing implies user collaboration and engagement, which fosters a renewal of city governance processes. In this article, we address a subset of crowdsourcing, named citizen-sourcing, where citizens interact with authorities collaboratively and actively. Many systems have experimented citizen-sourcing in city governance processes; however, their maturity levels are mixed. In order to focus on the service maturity, we introduce a city service maturity framework that contains five levels of service support and two levels of information integration. As an example, we introduce CITY FEED, which implements citizen-sourcing in city issue management process. In order to support such process, CITY FEED supports all levels of the maturity framework (publishing, transacting, interacting, collaborating, and evaluating) and integrates related information relationally and heterogeneously. In order to integrate heterogeneous information, it implements a threefold feed deduplication mechanism based on the geographic, text semantic, and image similarities of feeds. Currently, CITY FEED is in a pilot stage.