Heaven for grumblers or the road to better public services? A study of critical reports from a Swiss citizen co-production system

In 2013 the city of Zürich introduced the FixMyStreet-based system called “Züri wie neu”. Almost 10’000 reports on infrastructure problems have been filed by citizens since then. Recently, however, newspapers have... [ view full abstract ]

In 2013 the city of Zürich introduced the FixMyStreet-based system called “Züri wie neu”. Almost 10’000 reports on infrastructure problems have been filed by citizens since then. Recently, however, newspapers have criticized the platform claiming citizens use it manly to point out irrelevant issues (Ritter, 2016; SDA, 2016; Theile, 2016). The journalists mentioned grumbling people using their smartphones to report about trivial things such as trash at a remote sideroad or some small graffiti.

On the other hand academics have elaborated for many years about emerging, powerful citizen co-production systems and citizensourcing applications such as FixMyStreet (King and Brown, 2007; Chun et al., 2010; Johnston and Hansen, 2011; Schmidthuber and Hilgers, 2017). The use of new technologies is enabling inhabitants to participate in governmental actions and contribute their know-how and experience to improve society.

We therefore ask: How can the value of reports by a citizensourcing system such as FixMyStreet being measured and if so, what is the role of an information system regarding the value of such reports?

The article presents a short literature review of citizen co-production, citizensourcing, and open government literature, elaborates on the problem of quality in crowdsourcing initiatives, and presents a conceptual approach on how to measure the value of reports within an infrastructure issue reporting system. By applying this approach by manual coding to a sample of 990 reports from the “Züri wie neu” platform and using concepts of the information systems (IS) success model in a survey to the platform users we conduct a regression analysis determining the relationship between IS success factors and the value of such reports. Finally, we discuss the preliminary findings of our ongoing research work.