Crowd-sourcing for smart cities

Abstract

Smart cities are no longer a vision or a dream, with consolidated steps taken by a majority of the union governments these kind of cities are being promoted and developed to a great extent. It has been well evident in cities such as Barcelona, Stockholm, Seattle that this reality of cities becoming smart has resulted in a jargon of electronic devices pumped into the city ecosystem which has led to the widespread use of Information and Communication Technology. This deep rootedness of ICT in the city & its citizens has resulted in ICT to become truly pervasive and with the great influx of RFID tags, sensor networks, location sensors, cameras it has become as widespread as it possibly can. Crowdsourcing right from when it came to the fore has been seen as a distributed problem solving process which helps the crowd to get involved, participate and in most cases arrive at a well-defined solution. A city is basically its people, so if technology is able to use the species of its creators so as to create a socio-technical human then we may well possibly call it as the result of crowdsourcing work in smart city. Now, time has come when this relation needs a closer look and apt infrastructure and environment should be set up so as to enable citizens to be not a symbolic but a real art of the city. In this review we take a look at the possible scenarios where crowdsourcing activities can be performed and respective incentive models for members taking part in the crowdsourcing process in the context of Smart Cities using a Delphi review & finally conclude with an end to end crowdsourcing architecture.