Harnessing location-based services for effective citizen observatories

The essence of a city is its citizens and communities. A city’s infrastructure and associated services play a vital role in citizens' day-to-day living and their overall quality of life. Traditionally, services are deployed in a top-down approach where authorities, councils and public bodies take a reactive approach to address community needs and concerns. In this paper, we propose our ‘Citizen Observatory’ approach to enable citizens to take a proactive role in the management of their local communities and environment by supporting their engagement in the decision-making process. We discuss how to empower citizens and communities to engage with and assist authorities to establish a more informed understanding of residents’ needs and the status of their local environments. Through the WeSenseIt project, we employ a location-based crowdsourcing and communication strategy to develop a resilient, efficient and collaborative information ecosystem for decision-making in urban and rural areas.