Abstract
Civic technology is a fast-developing segment that holds huge potential
for a new generation of startups. A recent survey report on civic
technology noted that the sector saw $430 million in investment in just
the last two years. It’s not just a new market ripe with opportunity
it’s crucial to our democracy. Crowdsourcing has proven to be an
effective supplementary mechanism for public engagement in city
government in order to use mutual knowledge in online communities to
address such issues as a means of engaging people in urban design.
Government needs new alternatives – alternatives of modern, superior
tools and services that are offered at reasonable rates. An effective
and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables wide participation.
Response to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is very crucial for
engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a society. These findings
can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms. In
this research, we are trying to introduce a crowdsourcing platform,
which will be helpful to people who are facing problems in their
everyday practice because of the government services. This platform will
gather the information from the trending twitter tweets for last month
or so and try to identify which challenges public is confronting.
Twitter for crowdsourcing as it is a simple social platform for
questions and for the people who see the tweet to get an instant answer.
These problems will be analyzed based on their significance which then
will be made open to public for its solutions. The findings demonstrate
how crowdsourcing tends to boost community engagement, enhances citizens
‘ views of their town and thus tends us find ways to enhance the city’s
competitiveness, which faces some serious problems. Using of topic
modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm helped get
categorized civic technology topics which was then validated by simple
classification algorithm. While working on this research, we encountered
some issues regarding to the tools that were available which we have
discussed in the ‘Counter arguments’ section.