The Socially Smart Community

There is a large amount of discussion in the literature about smart cities where the focus of the discourse is on gathering and analyzing real-time data from smartphones or other sensors to support public services such as vehicular traffic flow and utility consumption or to infer human behaviour. There does not appear to be any discussion of ‘socially’ smart cities where the focus is on using citizens as ‘smart sensors.’ Here the citizens’ interactions with a community’s services are captured in a timely fashion to derive socio-economic indicators about characteristics of the population relevant to sectors such as education, food security, health, housing, community participation, community safety, income levels and government and to use those as a basis for monitoring community well-being or the effectiveness of government, social service and economic policies designed to produce community improvement. This paper provides the motivation for and description of a community-level socio-economic indicator system to support the socially smart community. The system will accept timely indicator base data from many different community sources and operate on that data using various software tools and maps. The data can be combined in various ways to show single indicators and relationships among indicators. In addition, multiple layers of data can be displayed on a map showing various geographic relationships. An initial version of this approach and related system to collect community-level social and economic data and display appropriate socio-economic indicators while protecting individual privacy, is being deployed in a mixed urban-rural community in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The web site can be found at myPerthHuron.ca.