Citizen Participation in Smart Government: A Conceptual Model and two IoT Case Studies

In its simplest form, smart government can be understood as the combination of new technologies and organizational innovation strategies to further modernize the public sector. Within this development, the Internet of Things (IoT) often forms a key technological foundation, offering government authorities new possibilities for interaction with citizens and local communities. On the one hand, citizens can indirectly participate in governmental services’ value creation by using public infrastructure or (un)knowingly sharing their data with the community. On the other hand, smart government initiatives may rely more intensively on citizens’ active participation to improve public service delivery, increase trust in government actions, and strengthen community sentiment. In this chapter, we discuss active and passive participation scenarios of smart government initiatives and explain how sensor-based systems may enhance citizens’ opportunities to participate in local governance. We present two practical cases from Switzerland demonstrating these two citizen involvement modes. We argue that active and passive participation of citizens and other stakeholders play a key role in generating necessary data for algorithmic decision-making to enable personalized interaction and real-time control of infrastructure in the future. We close with a discussion of the possibilities and boundaries of the IoT in the public sector and their possible influences on citizens’ privacy and policy-making.