Citizen reporting as the form of e-participation in smart cities

Abstract

The boom of digital technologies brought new communication channels into reporting of non-emergency incidents at the municipal level. This means that citizens have more options how to contact their city officials but more options also means higher complexity on both sides. Citizens need to know what channels are available and how to use them and responsible city officials need to observe more channels, which is time demanding. Since the research of non-emergency citizen reporting (NECR) systems is in its infancy, we introduce the study of 13 Czech regional capitals and their systems. In this study, we evaluate the existence of different types of NECR communication channels (phone, e-mail, electronic form, WebGis, and mobile application) and their quality based on four criteria (searchability, coverage of issues, visual geolocation, and display of sent reports).