Grinding A Diamond - The Iterative Development of Citizen-Initiated Services

Many city administrations follow the smart city concept to grasp the potential of citizen participation. However, most participation concepts are not developed thoroughly, this leading to unexploited poten-tial. Citizens are experts of their everyday life and are best aware of their personal needs. However, current forms of citizen participation stop at the idea phase of service engineering. Following design science research, we iteratively build and evaluate a so-called “digitalization street” which aims to systematically guide the citizens through the refinement and further development of their services. This digitalization street is implemented in a mid-size European city and integrates five modules which let citizens (1) describe their project proposal, (2) concretise according strengths, weaknesses, opportuni-ties and threats, (3) identify the gain creators and pain relievers, (4) create their solution, (5) present their solution. Based on literature and a requirement elicitation workshop, a first instantiation of the artefact was developed. We contribute to the existing body of knowledge by presenting a framework for creating services based on a citizen-centric approach. We exhibit how the digitalization street can be implemented into existing processes in the city administration and help to increase the citizen par-ticipation from a project to an evaluated prototype.