The use of geocrowdsourcing to report civic issues in the Czech Republic: a comparative analysis of geocrowdsourcing mobile applications

Abstract

The growth of information and communication technologies and ubiquitous Internet connections is pushing the limits of public management, allowing public officers to interact directly with citizens and to tap into a crowd of volunteers willing to participate in public administration. The trend for harnessing the wisdom of the public using new technologies, such as WebGIS and smartphones, through an open call is called geocrowdsourcing. Geocrowdsourcing opens up a wide range of new possibilities for gaining information, which are accessible exclusively by means of citizens and which would be otherwise unavailable. Thanks to GNSS integrated in almost every mobile device; any information reported can be located on the map. Thus, modern smartphones provide the versatile and adaptive environment for monitoring civic issues. The paper discusses the benefits and limitations of geocrowdsourcing use in e-government and particularly focuses on mobile applications for reporting civic issues in the Czech Republic. The aim is to identify and examine the factors which contribute to the success of geocrowdsourcing in e-governance, and to evaluate the success of geocrowdsourcing mobile applications deployment in the Czech Republic. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of four major geocrowdsourcing mobile applications currently used in the Czech Republic, namely Dej tip, Lepší místo, Plznito and ZmapujTo. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to comparatively explore geocrowdsourcing mobile applications used in the Czech Republic.