Towards continuous collaboration on civic tech projects: Use cases of a goal sharing system based on linked open data

Abstract

Civic hackathon is a participatory event for prototyping of innovative services through collaboration between citizens and engineers towards addressing social issues. Although continuous contributions are needed for improving the prototypes and for applying them to social issues, participants frequently stop contributions after the hackathon due to their day job. To address this problem, we applied our Web system, called GoalShare, which gathers linked open data (LOD) of hierarchical goals to address social issues, to civic hackathons held in the city of Nagoya in Japan. We compared goal structures between two situations. The results showed that goal structures input by team members themselves with enough instruction time were relatively detailed but varied widely among teams, and those input by a single GoalShare user with limited time remained at a simple overview level but had uniform level of detail. A more user-friendly interface usable without instruction is required for real-world situations.