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

Framework 6 consortia are not configured to produce commercially-ready products and services but the trial and testing of the ICING platform has led to a fruitful expansion of relationships of the ICING consortium into an ICING 'ecosystem'. Within this ecosystem, a range of non-partner commercial companies collaborated with the consortium to market test their own eGovernment technologies which also served to underline the flexibility of the ICING platform. These collaborations have provided valuable lessons to all the partners, and in particular the municipal partners involved, offering a further unexpected dissemination channel for ICING outputs

ICING was a Research and development project (Big R small d) and has successfully developed a technical prototype and surmounted a number of technical and social challenges in the process. However the platform as it currently exists does not allow a simple transfer from the three pilot city testbeds to other cities without further configuration and development. While the next phase of ICING will involve optimisation of the code we have developed and perhaps even 'rewiring' of some elements of the platformm the software has gone beyond the 'beta' stage. Much of the work is in the Open Source domain and is attracting a vibrant community of developers.

A key outcome from the project has been the ICING Roadmap document known as the ICING Cookbook which consists of principles and steps and contacts for advice which other cities need to follow to rapidly develop new services using the ICING platform. It is this experience and the methodological tools needed to involve citizens in the co-design of these services that will perhaps be the greatest contribution of ICING to the effectiveness of participative eGovernment. Three basic ingredients that are required by any municipality wishing to follow the steps in the ICING roadmap are:

* an initial feasibility study of city requirements and data structures

* the probable co-operation of a local mobile operator, and most importantly,

* commitment by the municipality to being citizen centric and ICT enabled.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to acknowledge the work of the ICING partners, whose results form the basis of this paper.

(1) Part of this paper has previously appeared as The ICING Cookbook, a description of the services and the deployment protocol for the ICING platforms and services.

(2) Personal communication: Tim Willoughby, Local Government Computer Services Board.

(3) Public Participation in Local Government: A survey of local authorities, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2002 at http://www.interactweb.org.uk/papers/ODPMPublicParticipationinLG.pdf on 19/08/2008.

(4) 22 Arroba refers to the city's designation of high tech industry as 22@ companies.

JOHN DONOVAN

Head of Enterprise and Research Development Services, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

EOIN KILFEATHER

Senior Researcher, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

FRANCES M BUGGY

Project Manager, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

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