The city users are the first stakeholder of the city. The concept of city users includes several different categories which can be involved in the city usage or even in contributing to services at different levels and in different manners, for example: residents, students, commuters, tourists, visitors, business visitors, etc.
The most dynamic cities try to involve the city users providing them instruments to communicate with the city / local gov in easy manner, via some multichannel solutions: mobile Apps, open call numbers, web pages and blogs, social media, help desk, info points, white boxes in the city, telegrams, SMS, etc. The local gov should be capable to collect this information in a uniform manner to address the requests according to some priority order and needs. More recently, the usage of Virtual Assistants based on natural languages processing and LLM, Large Language Models can be used to automatically interpreting, classifying the messages / requests received.
Snap4City provides a number of solutions for collecting complains / suggestions from city users via mobile and web Apps (mobile App of the “in a Snap” series). They can be anonymous or authenticated. The complains are typically classified and the user can tick one of them. Each complain can include a media (image or video), a description, the date and time, GPS coordinates, etc. The complains are collected by the systems and can be managed by the operators on view / dashboard according to their state, for example: init, ack, proc, closed. The advantage of providing a complain by means of a registered user may imply for the user to receive acknowledgements of the complain provided and its eventual addressing, and change of status (notifications can be sent via mobile apps and/or via email). Example of classified motivations are: Abandoned vehicle in a public right of way, Dead animal, Lost/unattended pet, Graffiti, Illegal dumping (garbage, debris, junk, etc.) on public property, overgrown vegetation, Parking enforcement, Damage or maintenance issues in Municipality parks, Street Pothole, Public litter, Street sign and traffic signal damage/malfunctioning, Streetlight outage or damage, Other General inquiry to the Municipality, etc.
The case in which a large number of complains are collected may implies to have a strategy grounded on some political decision on addressing them with some priority order, and how they are addressed, by who and when. This activity may imply to use intervention teams and a ticketing system on the basis of some formal workflow. In Snap4City, any workflow management system can be used, as well the OpenMaint.
The mobile Apps of Snap4City may also Engage the city users to perform some activities. For example: to take pictures, respond to some questionnaires, to provide some comments, to confirm to have received some suggestions and may be accepted or ranking their usefulness. The activity of User Engagement is much more complex and involve an Engager Server with a rule base system.
See also:
- PAVAL, Virtual Assistant of DISIT Lab: PAVAL: A location-aware virtual personal assistant for retrieving geolocated points of interest and location-based services", Journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Elsevier, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952197618301994
- mobile app Toscana in a Snap: https://www.snap4city.org/541
- User Engagement: https://www.snap4city.org/486
- MultiPurpose user engagement: https://www.snap4city.org/548
- User Engagement admin: https://www.snap4city.org/472
