Smart Citizen
Open source technology for citizens political participation in smarter cities
It seems like almost everything in life is being made “smart” from smart phones to smart cars, smart homes, smart grids and even smart boards! Now there is smart citizen too. Smart citizen is a platform that tries to answer the question of how citizens should interact with their government, with their cities and with each other.
Smart Citizen is a platform to generate participatory processes of people in the cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive and open indicators, and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants.
In addition to being a platform, there is the Smart Citizen Kit. The Smart Citizen Kit is a small box that can be placed on the outside of a building, which carries sensors that measure air composition (CO and NO2), temperature, humidity, light intensity and sound levels (noise pollution). Once it is placed and set, the device streams live data that is available online on the website for anyone to access. Initially, the kit was tested in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Manchester, but now it is available all over the world.
When citizens have direct access to data like this, they can better understand their own city, but also other cities across the world. They can take action and demand change, for example while measuring noise pollution and air quality, once the citizen has the facts, they can take it up with their government.
