Opportunities and Challenges for Civic Engagement: A Global Investigation of Innovation Competitions

The population in many cities all over the world is continuously growing and with this growing number of people infrastructural, health and location-related problems increase. It is assumed that these problems could be addressed by means of open government data which many governments publish on their web portals so that it can be further processed and transformed. Since the citizens themselves know best what they need, governments encourage them to participate in open data innovation competitions and to create value added services for their city. The reuse of open urban government data during hackathons or app competitions is a new trend in knowledge societies of how governments and citizens work together. But have these events still become practice in local governments and are they helpful means to foster government-to-citizen communication and collaboration? The authors analyze innovation competitions in 24 world cities to see how they are applied and whether they have the potential to make the city “smart”.