eGovernment for innovative cities of the next generation: The ICING Project

People can act as collectors of knowledge about the environments in which they find themselves. This knowledge is a valuable resource from which city administrations and other urban stakeholders would benefit if they were able to access it. However, citizens normally do not interact with their city other than to access basic information and to conduct financial transactions. In order to harness this unused, and often tacit, knowledge and make it explicit and available, the ICING (Innovative Cities for the Next Generation) project developed software and services to link citizens to their cities, using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The result is the ICING platform that allows people to use many different communication devices to both contribute information to and access services from their city and from their fellow citizens. A range of ICING services (which are delivered using the ICING platform) was developed in consultation with end users - both ordinary people and city councils themselves.