Crowdsourcing: Tackling challenges in the engagement of citizens with smart city initiatives

The engagement and involvement of citizens with the design of Smart City (SC) initiatives help ensure a maximisation of benefit for all stakeholders. However, undertaking processes that facilitate citizen engagement often involves prohibitive challenges in cost, design and deployment mechanisms, particularly for small cities which have limited resources. We report on a project carried out in Cork City, a small city in Ireland, where a crowdsourcing-inspired method was used. Academics, local government, volunteers and civil organisations came together to collaboratively design and carry out a study to represent local interests around the deployment of smart city infrastructure. Our project demonstrates a new way of translating crowdsourcing for use in government problem-solving. It was three-times less in cost, creative in design, and flexible but collaborative in deployment, resulting in high volume of reliable data for project prioritisation and implementation.