Urban Civics: An IoT middleware for democratizing crowdsensed data in smart societies

While the design of smart city ICT systems of today is still largely focused on (and therefore limited to) passive sensing, the emergence of mobile crowd-sensing calls for more active citizen engagement in not only understanding but also shaping of our societies. The Urban Civics Internet of Things (IoT) middleware enables such involvement while effectively closing several feedback loops by including citizens in the decision-making process thus leading to smarter and healthier societies. We present our initial design and planned experimental evaluation of city-scale architecture components where data assimilation, actuation and citizen engagement are key enablers toward democratization of urban data, longer-term transparency, and accountability of urban development policies. All of these are building blocks of smart cities and societies.