eGovernment for innovative cities of the next generation: the ICING project.

INTRODUCTION

The average rate of contact most European citizens have with their city or municipal authority is surprisingly low at five transactions per person per year (2). Not only is this 'transactional' participation level markedly low but ordinary people's participation in their own governance appears to be declining. Similarly, voting rates are declining, people are less likely to become involved in politics, and citizens seldom make input into public consultation processes. A 2002 survey by the Office of the Deputy UK Prime Minister concluded that up to 14 million people in the UK participated in local consultations but the report also showed that use of traditional methods of consultation had probably peaked and that new, largely web based, methods were likely to be more useful and productive in the future. (3) This minimal level of engagement has the potential to undermine not only citizens' sense of ownership of their city, but also the local authority's awareness of the needs and requirements of people living in the city they run.

In contrast, the explosion of advocacy websites, collaborative websites, social networking sites and shared workspace sites all demonstrate people's inherent need to communicate. Can this desire to communicate be leveraged to increase the willingness of citizens to participate in their governance? ICING started from the premise that it could be leveraged and that the key to this would be 'people scale' services.

The ICING project arose from a particular set of circumstances in three European Cities Dublin, Barcelona, and Helsinki. Each city had identified an urban area which was currently in decline but which presented an opportunity for rejuvenation as twenty-first century neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods were:

Arabianranta, an old industrial area in the east of Helsinki. The area had a history of potteries and similar industrial complexes from the late 19th and early to mid 20th century. Helsinki Council had earmarked the area for redevelopment to enhance the quality of life for new and existing residents in the area. The area will also house high-tech, knowledge- intensive new companies. One ICING partner (Helsinki's University of Art and Design) is based in the area and has been working with community groups for several years on the redevelopment.

Poble Nou, known as the 'Manchester of Catalonia', is an area of Barcelona with a very old industrial heritage. The area eventually began to decline as it became restricted and new industry located elsewhere. Poble Nou sits beside the Vila Olympica, developed for the Barcelona Olympics. Barcelona City Council decided to redevelop the area as the city's technological and innovation district. ICING partner, 22 Arroba (4) BCN S.A., is the statutory development agency.

The challenge across all the testbed areas was to make these neighbourhoods more responsive to their inhabitants by using information and communication technologies (ICT) to support the community and to enhance their communication with the municipal authorities. ICING did not set out to invent entirely new technologies but did seek to leverage existing technologies in new ways. The aim was to make the resulting services as useful, seamless, simple and as comprehensive as possible. The project also aimed to offset the cost to municipalities of the necessary ICT infrastructure investment by lowering the transaction costs associated with dealing with their constituent communities. The system had also to work with existing business processes to provide a better experience for citizens and city employees.

ICING was a STREP (Strategic, Targeted, Research Project) requiring a particular constellation of partners from a range of European countries. This mix of partners had to include commercial entities that were central to both the development and exploitation of the results.

The ICING project is a partnership of eleven organisations, drawn from universities, companies and city councils around Europe.

The ICING partners are;

* Dublin Institute of Technology (coordinator)

* University of Art and Design, Helsinki

* Fundacio Barcelona Media, Barcelona

* Dublin City Council

* Barcelona City Council

* Helsinki City Council

* Agencia Barcelona Ecologia

* 22 Arroba, Barcelona

* eSpatial Solutions Limited, Dublin

* Telefonica Y&D, Barcelona

* T-Systems Iberia, Barcelona

Each of the partners brought specific technical skills to the project. Many had worked together on previous successful projects. However, this project did have a number of 'unusual' characteristics that required a different range of abilities. Since the testbeds would be physical locations which would in effect become 'living labs' within the cities, it was vital that city authorities were fully involved in the project so that their plans could influence the project work and outputs from the project could in turn be a relevant part of municipal development plans.

Having the cities on board immediately raised the problem of how ICING 'products' could interface with the cities' existing data infrastructures. It was important to the cities that ICING added functionality without interfering with any systems pre-existing in the cities. T-Systems Iberia (a part of the international T-Systems Group) specialises in integration of heterogeneous IT systems, as is often required by public administrations. ICING relied on location-based information so it was very important to have a company in the project expert in developing these services. eSpatial Solutions, an Irish SME specialising in Geographic Imaging Systems (GIS) has done many projects for public authorities across the world. eSpatial has developed a number of leading edge applications and their expertise was critical to the success of the project.

Since an important access mode to city services was always the mobile phone, access to mobile network facilities and the experience of a mobile provider were essential. Telefonica is Spain's largest telecom supplier and, through its subsidiary Moviales, it is also the largest provider of mobile telephony services in Spain. It is also the owner of O2, the second largest provider of mobile telephony in Europe. Telefonica's research arm was a partner in the project.

The total budget for the project was [euro]5m and included a contribution of almost [euro]3m from the European Commission's Directorate of Information Society and Media, eGovernment unit, funded through the Union's Framework Research Programme 6.

THE 'THIN SKINNED' CITY

One major principle informing the project was the notion that cities should be 'thin skinned', becoming more sensitive and responsive to the requirements of people living in those cities. While 'thin skinned' has a connotation of over-sensitivity to English speakers, we are using the term to emphasize our concept of a city that is more sensitive to its citizens. Citizens gather and share vast amounts of information about their city simply through lived experience. They respond to this information, they influence and contribute to it, and they use it largely without thinking about or being overly aware of it. The managers of the cities concerned would benefit enormously from access to some of this information. The problem has been how to encourage people to share their experience in ways that benefit them and the city. Large scale 'consultation tools' do not seem to work, wikis are contributed to by the majority of people, and the Internet itself is currently only available to about 60% of the population of the average developed country. ICING identified the need for simple tools performing discrete citizen services that individuals could relate to, that were ubiquitously available and were intuitive to use.

ICING Objectives

One of the major research interests of the project was to try to determine the human factors we need to consider when we encourage electronically supported communities. In addition, the project took place in an urban environment which allowed us to deploy assistive intelligence in the city and to understand how better services could be provided to all urban citizens.

In order to be successful in the project, our services had to be defined by the real requirements of citizens and they would be integrally involved in the development of the services. The ICING Urban Mediator (IUM) was a special case of this citizen defined service. IUM allows a very flexible, evolving, social software interface to the city. Another objective of the project was to ensure that existing commodity technologies could be used by citizens to interact with our services. All of these software and services needed to be deployed in a real life testbed in each of the three cities.

Finally, having developed and implemented the software and services, we wanted to be sure that what we developed met the requirements of the citizens who had helped the design and to provide a 'roadmap' for other cities that might like to implement ICING in their cities. These objectives defined the nature and content of the project but a key element of the project has been the central involvement of citizens' groups in the development and specification of the services and the interfaces, a process also known as 'co-design'.

Our original intention had been to make our service platform available from any connectable device but, largely because of its ubiquitous nature, the de facto citizen user communication device has become the mobile phone. These sophisticated, hand held computing and communication devices are becoming cheaper and more widespread. With mobile penetration rates (number of active SIM cards in circulation) of more than 120% in Europe (in Italy, even 150%) and a churn rate of less than 18 months, the networking potential of ordinary people is increasing all the time. In effect, citizens are capable of effectively becoming 'sensors' in their own environments and thus potentially regular participants in how they are managed.

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