Democratizing Access to Utilities — Citizen Engagement Strategy in Blockchain for Smart-Cities.

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Partage

21 min readNov 20, 2023

This article is the third from a series on Blockchain for Smart-Cities where I am developing ideas for a solution to increase the use value of our cities by democratizing access to utilities in urban areas. Cities are facing unprecedented challenges at an increasing intensity, and solutions are to be adopted urgently. Homelessness, inflation, precarious conditions of living, geo-political tensions, migration of populations, and drug use undermine our streets while climate change is at stake and environmental disasters are affecting populations more frequently: water flooding, heat waves, lack of basic foodstuff and commodities. Systemic problems will not be solved solely by political electives and citizen engagement appears as the only way to tackle urban issues in a democratic manner. Smart citizens participate in their city’s daily governance and are concerned about increasing the quality of life of their fellow inhabitants and protecting their environment.

Citizen science is already a decades-old practice and has proven many benefits like reducing costs of production, increasing consciousness, fastening up the learning curve, and easing adoption. While blockchain technology has many solutions to offer such as a new global standard to secure digital identities and internet user data, it has a hard time going to mass adoption, as a mix of bad press, plus an appearance of complexity to onboard users is discouraging many. Taking a look back at citizen science experiments is a good place to find the resources for a participatory approach to design, decision-making, data gathering, and the deployment of a solution. All projects have in common the idea that research and action must be done with people and not on or for people, and the opportunities to engage the public in the process of problem formulation, data collection, and evaluation have to be seen in this wider context of global sustainability.

PLAN
1. Citizen Science and Participatory Approaches
- Definitions
- Methods
- Quality

2- Sensor Networks Case Studies
- Human sensing
- Hardware sensing
- Blockchain for Sensor Networks

3- Citizen Engagement in Blockchain for Smart Cities
- What is Partage?
- User Adoption
- Success Factors

1- Citizen Science and Participatory Approaches

The development of digital technologies led to new ways of engaging citizens in the activities of institutions and academic research. Citizen science projects emerged as powerful approaches to data gathering in scientific projects, especially in nature conservation, ecology, and biological sciences. But citizen science is more than outsourcing data collection: it is about raising awareness, building capacity, and strengthening communities. While adding value, citizens acquire new learning and skills, and a deeper understanding of the democratic work at scale. As a result of this open, networked, and trans-disciplinary scenario, individual-to-society interactions are improved leading to more democratic governance, based on evidence-informed decision-making by amateur or non-professional citizens.

In the absence of a centralized authority, decentralized networks like blockchains rely on innovative governance models to ensure the longevity of their projects. By design, blockchain governance employs mechanisms to make decisions on project directions and future updates to ensure that the underlying protocol and ecosystem run smoothly and efficiently. Governance mechanisms are either off-chain, which includes public discussion, proposals, and collectively agreed-upon updates, or on-chain, where stakeholders vote with native coins to make changes to the blockchain directly.

In a participatory model of decision-making, citizens bring local knowledge about the problem and their needs, they can generate new solutions collectively informed by their knowledge, and they bring different points of view, leading to more diverse perspectives. When involved in the process, citizens are also more likely to accept the solutions. Project design tools empower participation from different societal groups in activities that would normally require scientific skills and knowledge. This includes non-specialists, hobbyists, and amateurs, but also professional scientists doing science outside their traditional institutional settings. Many citizen science projects are private or community-based initiatives that use scientific methods combined with other forms of inquiry to explore techno-scientific issues and societal challenges.

A citizen science toolkit for citizens willing to participate in monitoring the air quality of their city.

Method

Relying on voluntary citizens, large volumes of data can be collected from all over the city in a short period of time, at a low cost. Using hardware and software as sensors or simple human observation makes a difference in the method, and the crowdsourced data will need quality control before being published to ensure that further analysis respects scientific validity. The Internet and digitalization itself expanded the scope of the collaboration between civil society and institutions, offering multiple opportunities for online contribution, or mobile applications collecting data automatically. Participation has become easier and faster for volunteers to start contributing and to find an appropriate time, place, and device to engage. In order to keep grounded and relevant, a participatory approach to societal problem-solving should focus on addressing real-world problems and social issues broadly shared by the participants.

Nowadays approaches to design allow to provide users with tools, websites, and applications that are both convenient to use and to collect and download data. The importance of platform design in user acquisition is emphasized in many academic research reports proving a direct influence of project interface on volunteer interaction and their will to participate. Citizen participation is recommended up to the co-creation of participatory tools enabling them to gain better results thanks to the knowledge obtained on the protocol itself. Ideally, citizens are not considered research assistants but rather co-researchers, they are able to design and implement, jointly with scientists or autonomously, valid and robust research processes. Adequate participatory infrastructures are often required, serving as intermediaries between civil society groups and the scientific community.

Mobile phones are undoubtedly the most spread technology worldwide. The cheaper standard phones available to low-income groups in developing countries are enhanced with the same sensor capabilities such as GPS and microphones as the more sophisticated phones sold in the most advanced economies. Crowds will act as data sources, by reporting observations of their environment through text, camera (photos or videos), or phone calls. Mobile crowd photographing has become a major crowd-sensing paradigm, which allows people to use cameras on smart devices for local sensing. The accuracy of the data collected is based on the number of sensors operational for data collection (more sensor operators will increase data accuracy). In order to save the network cost and improve the transmitting efficiency, pictures will be preselected by participants and then uploaded to the server avoiding redundancy or bad quality. High-quality data will create a robust knowledge-intensive city.

Quality:

Many citizen science projects produce high-quality data but some projects are plagued with deficits in data practices. Even within a specific domain a wide range of approaches and protocols exist. The quality of the collected data may be adequate according to the standards of each project: different projects and stakeholders aspire to different levels of data accuracy and there is no one-fits-all solution. A researcher might set thresholds to achieve their analytical objective, a policymaker may be concerned about avoiding bias in the data while citizens may require an easy-to-understand data set. Different stakeholders may have different standards for data quality. However, ensuring the validity and reliability of data always needs to be addressed, especially when their collection and production are externalized outside of professional control.

Data quality issues in citizen science projects come from:
- Data collection protocols not being followed by participants.
- Data collection protocols do not match the goals of the project or the targetted participants.
- Data collection protocols incorrectly implemented.
- Data collection protocols are not comprehensive and are used by stakeholders with different data quality expectation levels.
- Data used are not fit for purpose.

2- Sensor Networks Case Studies

Sensor networks are a widely adopted concept in science from telecommunication engineering to genetical research, and integrating citizens as participants in the sensing operation is a common practice. Some fields use human sensing or hardware support for data collection but most crowdsensing initiatives nowadays rely on both.

Seasonal bird movements:
The roots of citizen science are in the 18th century, starting from offline bird-watching projects. Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology was actually the first to use the term citizen science. Animals' movements span the globe and are integral to behavior, survival, and reproduction studies. Monitoring their movement is particularly important in the face of climate and landscape changes, and this uninterrupted practice has evolved in the 21st century with websites, science games, network building, etc. Participatory databases collect millions of animal observations throughout the year, such as the eBird database which comprises over one billion global bird observations and is used for population distribution modeling. The probabilistic modeling framework BirdFlow proves a highly accurate predictive model built on top of participatory data.

Ecoacoustic sensing:
Nature sound recordings have been collected for over a hundred years, with an exponential increase since the 1950s, to describe and decipher animal communication. The practice of deploying remote acoustic sensors in natural environments has been systematized under the term Passive Acoustic Monitoring, a technical term mostly used in marine acoustics but then employed in terrestrial and aquatic environments. An acoustic sensor can record continuously or regularly over a long time period and collect information on a full assemblage of species which ensures a high sampling effort with a low technical investment. Research in eco-acoustic methods has grown massively over the past 15 years, developing methodology in hardware devices, signal processing, machine learning, and visualization, and demonstrated usefulness in monitoring threatened species, invasive species, poaching, pollution (on land and below water), land degradation and mountain ecosystems.

Mosquito Alert:
A recent development in citizen science has been the emergence of projects to fight disease-vector mosquitoes. Invasive vector species have spread quickly around the globe, and the World Health Organization has issued a strong warning that governments and development agencies must act quickly before this alarming situation further deteriorates. Traditional methods of mosquito surveillance and control are costly and often implemented in uncoordinated patchworks at a time when public sector budgets are under increasing pressure. Citizen science offers a highly effective alternative: humans act as mosquito sensors across large geographic areas, connecting into massive, active networks, providing early mosquito prevalence estimates comparable in quality to those from traditional methods.

Air quality/pollution:
Air pollution represents a major threat to cities in their challenge to improve liveability. To avoid increasing monitoring costs, attention is redirected toward low-cost sensing units and opportunistic citizen sensing. Different devices have been used from fixed air pollution stations, smaller passive tubes, smart mobile sensors, passive sensors, portable sensors… Furthermore, including citizens in the testing and exploration of urban air pollution opens opportunities for direct environmental awareness, debate, and future prevention strategies. Some examples of such projects offer a centralized collection of data, processing, and real-time map visualization through online platforms and mobile applications. These citizen sensing projects intend to expand citizen engagement in environmental issues and help them make changes in their daily journey-to-work trips in order to avoid polluted urban areas.

Noise Pollution:
Noise pollution is another common problem in urban environments that may affect health and personal performance. Collecting and mapping noise data is needed for local government and inhabitants to understand and address related issues. Participatory sensing using a smartphone as a noise sensor allows citizens to contribute to the collection of noise data, and has shown added value in improving the mapping and accessibility of noise pollution data to the public. NoiseTube for example is a mobile app for participatory sensing of noises and is embedded in an ambient noise evaluation system including a community-based web memory. The noise mapping process aims to assess the noise exposure resulting from the presence of noise sources such as cities, highways, railways, and industrial units in a particular area. In this way, the resulting map spatially highlights the spatial variation of ambient noise levels. The noise from traffic currently represents one of the major sources of environmental pollution.

Urban Traffic:
Urban traffic impedance is an important factor introduced to indicate the traffic flow state of a piece of road or lanes at a moment. Citizen science leverages check-in records obtained from mobile social networks to build a fine-grained but inexpensive urban impedance model. Traditional impedance models require a large amount of supporting data, including the geographical distribution of public facilities, traffic volume of different time periods, and population in the range of study. These data are difficult to collect from many cities in developing countries. As the use of mobile social networks has grown immensely, a large amount of user mobility data has been generated. Mobile social networks allow a user to check in at points of interest, which corresponds to an online record describing one's current physical location, and share this record with friends. This new data source can be leveraged to build a fine-grained but inexpensive urban impedance model.

Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT:
Wireless Sensor Networks have attracted the interest of industries and they have been used in several application areas (military, health, transportation, agriculture). They are ad-hoc networks, composed of sensor nodes deployed in an area of interest to monitor and return information requested by users. Sensor data is usually transmitted to users over a central station, named the base station. The IoT concept has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, and wireless sensor networks remain a subset of the IoT paradigm. The Internet of Things aims to connect many types of equipment to each other through specific software, sensors, and devices, including vehicles, home appliances, smartphones, etc. These devices are automated to maintain special responses based on environmental changes. They can also exchange various data with devices in other networks without any human interference. Several cross-field researches have focused on studying and improving data management of these sensor networks to reduce costs of energy and improve communication performances.

Blockchain for Sensor Networks

By increasing the number of devices that generate a huge amount of data in high frequency, the traditional centralized approaches will soon not be sustainable anymore. Blockchain can help solve the challenges of sensor networks: the decentralized structure of blockchain is very suitable for implementing processes of multi-agent communicating systems. Local decision-making and distribution control can decrease the computational resource requirement. Blockchain facilitates peer-to-peer digital transactions, thus it can potentially activate machine-to-machine communications and data exchanges between smart devices. Blockchain technology can provide a simple infrastructure for two devices in order to transfer directly a portion of the property, such as money or data through a safe and secure smart contract. This peer-to-peer data exchange can be generalized among devices, humans, and things to maintain a trusted fully distributed, and decentralized infrastructure. Due to the decentralized structure, collaborative work, being open-source, and high security of blockchain, its performance can facilitate the use of the Internet of Things.

Blockchain technology by design features solutions to some citizen science challenges. Blockchain facilitates disintermediation, enhances trust and transparency, avoids certain kinds of fraud, and potentially reduces overall costs by deleting intermediaries. It supports building a strong connection with participants, proposes a data ownership model to regain users’ trust and loyalty, and designs effective strategies based on direct communication with users. Furthermore, it automates data fulfillment procedures, ensures transparency and security to the participant, enables transparent transactions, improves efficiency by minimizing back-office administration, and enhances data access effectiveness. Blockchain eliminates the need for trust between peer-to-peer transactions, and Blockchain networks could be used for the safe storage of large amounts of anonymous customer data, ensuring individual anonymity whilst also allowing third parties to use this data to offer more value to their customers.

But blockchain also has some downsides: in spite of the above-listed benefits, it remains a slowly adopted technology. Potential users may feel uncomfortable proceeding through setup steps they never experienced before like installing a crypto wallet, purchasing a credit in cryptocurrency to initiate their onboarding process, or having to deal with scattered services in the ecosystem for the different tasks they’d like to achieve.

3- Citizen Engagement in Blockchain for Smart Cities

Despite a large body of experience, citizen engagement remains a challenge, especially when it comes to harnessing complex forms of citizen collaboration that go beyond data collection. Closely linked to the concepts of user-centered and participatory design, which both place users at the core of the solution design process, a key element for successful citizen engagement is the creation of a shared understanding between the different groups of participating citizens and those of professionals leading the operation. Methods such as concept visualization, mock-ups, storytelling, and prototyping can support this bridge. Information asymmetries and goal conflicts between stakeholders are more efficiently addressed through face-to-face interaction in physically co-located settings to further a sense of transparency and trust building. The underlying assumption of science as the primary source of knowledge requires citizen participation to conform to the scientific process. More flexible forms of engagement relax this requirement by giving citizen participants more influence on the project design and empowering them to collaborate with various stakeholders autonomously.

The transformation of the urban environment is a complex process that involves many stakeholders, different topics, and sometimes diverging personal or institutional interests. The intricate cluster of norms and regulatory plans aiming to facilitate and coordinate the management of city development often results in the opposite effect of entrapping many small and local urban transformations in the name of a unitary and coordinated approach to urban problems. The consequences of this complexity are the slowing down of the transformation process and the rising of conflicts and frictions between citizens and public administrations. To create the condition of having a consistent and prepared “bottom-up approach” and therefore getting a successful co-creating process, a valid strategy is to integrate urban innovation projects within Urban Living Labs. Many cities worldwide adopted this framework to facilitate the experimental deployment of urban technologies on their infrastructure. It usually consists of direct access to municipal executives in the concerned department, and a ready-to-implement legal framework allowing a startup to try their tech in real life on a dedicated urban infrastructure. It also creates synergies between participating companies working at their deployment at the same time in the same city.

What is Partage?

Partage proposes a network of blockchain-controlled smart locks deployed on urban infrastructure to share physical utilities between participating co-owners. It comprises:
- NFC readers to control user capability to open locks.
- a marketplace of items to borrow against deposit.
- the possibility for owners to upload new items to share on the marketplace.

The use of low-cost devices is important as they’ll be installed in public spaces with maintenance partly made by the users themselves. The locker has to ensure the security and durability of the locked utility and the lock itself to not be stolen, vandalized, or hacked. Installing the lock device inside the locker instead of outside is the first obvious security trick I can think of. Transparent windows could also encourage users to check what’s in the locker before being willing to pay to open the door.

A network of lockers could essentially go anywhere a property need to be secured, going from luggage storage in train stations to bike lockers, commercial freezer for rent, multi-purpose lockers… All of them could represent an opportunity to deploy blockchain-controlled devices and a motivation for citizens to install a wallet on their smartphone and start using a blockchain.

Lockers are rented for undefined purposes or for specific use such as storing a bike.

It exists in all sizes, as big as these walk-in commercial freezer lockers for rent.

NFC readers can be used with a phone, an access card, or a smartwatch, to open a physical door, grant you access to a digital portal, or transfer a payment or data.

An increasing level of participation and ownership is clearly important and desirable for such a network of blockchain-controlled smart locks. Participants in such projects are usually motivated by a wide range of factors, from identification with a project focus and goals to personal interest (e.g. learning new things), desire to help (e.g. helping science or society), shared values and beliefs (e.g. knowledge should be free), social recognition and reputation or simply fun and enjoyment. Recognition and regular feedback are key elements to ensuring continuing engagement and catering to changes in motivation. Working closely with local government and the user community will be crucial in order to know where to position Partage’s lockers in town. This will depend on the most enthusiastic participants and the items that are most suspected to be shared between them. Such information will be revealed through field research, interviews, and surveys to the population, and later increase the chance of user adoption significantly.

One reality to keep in mind to avoid later frustration: participatory projects often verify the “90–9–1” rule: 90% of registered users don’t contribute at all, 9% do not contribute regularly and only 1% of volunteers work on a regular basis. The levels of participation differ according to the time of the project launch, the vigor of project promotion, press coverage, and the release of new data will usually result in spikes in participation activity.

User adoption
The learning side of the co-creation process plays a relevant role in creating the necessary conditions for implementing an effective bottom-up process. Another strategy is to embrace a participatory approach within the first stage of the project. A collective way of gathering knowledge while perceiving and interpreting the urban space that surrounds the community of adopters. The process aims to collectively involve future users in observing, measuring, and interpreting the urban criticalities and the data collected to reach the design of possible ideas to transform the urban environment. Experience proves that it is possible to reach good and useful results with a bottom-up approach only if citizens are given the tools to empower themselves. Citizen participation gets empowered as citizens are called to collectively monitor what they previously decided to scope.

Worker selection is another important factor for increasing user adoption, as they are often engaged users who become part of the company’s staff after having proven naturally aligned interests. A two-step selection which starts with selecting workers who satisfy predefined constraints, and will consider the worker’s participation history in a second step to further select those who are more likely to undertake the user adoption from their personal experience.

Participation Tools and Channels
Common considerations on the tools and channels used for wider and more efficient participation are closely related to the focus on real-world problem-solving. Co-creative projects require adequate communication and interaction channels, from project coordination to progressive validation of results. The importance of combining physical or analogic materials (visual canvases, collage diagrams, posters about results, etc.) with online mechanisms and tools, such as collaborative writing applications and democratic participation platforms should facilitate the sequencing process from robust proposals, generated in face-to-face participatory design dynamics, to the online integration of diversity with as many points of view as possible. Adoption of existing technologies paves the way to achieve the second goal: enabling participatory projects to absorb new technological advances and developments and, thus, ensure that engaging citizens will not be left behind in the technological race. In other words, participatory projects need to stay at the forefront of technological advances in order to be in a position to adopt future developments.

Mobile Apps
Mobile apps are a consensual go-to. As mobile phones are the most spread tech device worldwide, mobile apps form an ideal support infrastructure for citizen engagement. With mobile devices, citizens have constant access to communication platforms, sensors, and data stored on the internet. Mobile apps enable direct participation. They can also help to overcome the obstacles of location and time in certain participation tasks. Participants can contribute observations in real-time, and report relevant sightings immediately, which not only increases the quality of the provided data (in terms of timeliness) but also improves the connection of the observer with the subject and its environment, as the observer is immersed in the field and is aware of the context of their observations.
Like all apps, citizen engagement apps are subject to user expectations and should therefore incorporate the following core requirements:
• Usability
• Look and feel
• Performance
• Security
• Compatibility
• User privacy

Mediation and user support
It is essential that someone is responsible for carrying out a well-planned, independent, and neutral facilitation of including all participants. Whether or not they have a complete understanding of the project as a whole, a facilitator can create the necessary conditions for equitable and free speaking. They can support collective decision-making mechanisms during intense participant discussions. Facilitation understood as one of the main activities of intermediation, requires intensity and effort, agility and reflexivity, as well as some moderation experience and personal empathy. Facilitators need to have a script for the co-creative sequence that is going to take place.

Interactive map for data co-visualisation
The visualization tool needs to be as user-friendly as possible. For the comfort of users, the map shouldn’t be overloaded with information but instead organized in layers. The main layer is the one that displays the locations of available utilities. Filtered research will also be useful by utility category, provider, or location. Secondary data such as user satisfaction or the amount of deposit to borrow a shared item will be useful on the individual item description, but not necessarily need to be integrated into the research filter on the main map.

Gamification
Gamification is often seen as a great user adoption vehicle, particularly when it’s expected to implement new behavioral patterns among the young targetted population. The gaming industry is already one of the most promising markets for blockchain technology and one of the industries where NFTs are the most widely adopted after digital art. Games and social computations are also being used for the sole purpose of observing user interaction and collecting data on their behavior in order to see emerging patterns in a targetted niche of adopters and reveal trends that would help reach mass adoption. Working on the tokenization of real estate properties last year I was suggested by a friend to implement my beta version in a Monopoly game which early adopters could play in real life at social gatherings. Partage isn’t ready yet to deploy such a game on top of early bird users but is open to partnering with local initiatives on this.

Post-production exploitation
Various machine learning, deep learning, and AI models can be used from the available data. Considering the spatial aspect of a network of physically shared objects, a self-organizing map is a way to explore factor knowledge. Predictive models on individual users’ needs, on the utilities to supply to specific locations of the network, or even on the potential success of a new utility to be shared on the network will be conducted in a post-production phase. Which factor is the most important factor for the development of this utility? What value of this factor is most positive to the development of such utility?

Intellectual property and data privacy
Intellectual Property Rights of the participant need to be addressed at an early stage of the process to ensure that the outcome of the projects can be published, and re-used in full respect of those rights. This leads to a number of additional reflections on data availability and re-usability to address. Privacy issues revolve around the fact that participants by taking an active part in participatory campaigns, risk exposing private details about themselves, such as their location at particular points in time. To ensure participants’ privacy, a system could provide anonymization of the user’s identity. However, given that every node/participant is anonymized, it becomes harder to put in place an effective trust mechanism, which requires the identification of both trustworthy nodes and malicious/unreliable ones. System designers can use incentive schemes to incentivize users to sacrifice their privacy so that an efficient trust mechanism can be put in place.

Critical Success Factors
Critical Success Factors are the limited number of areas that must be considered in order to ensure success in an organization or project. Critical Success Factors should be measurable, controllable, and limited in number. The Critical Success Factors should also be clear and unambiguous to ensure consistent consideration. The Critical Success Factors identified will assist the participatory crowdsourcing public in collecting large amounts of high-quality public safety data.
- public safety issues must be reported as soon as they occur
- contextual relevance must be described with the most precision
- response given to public safety issues in time, quality, and re-occurrence

Participatory campaigns assess high-level participation rates as good and low-level as bad. However, examining participation in terms of levels of knowledge coming in and out of the program reveals different values. The quality and expensiveness of the locked items are good indicators of the trust the users put in our system.