Supporting citizens to shape the future of Milton Keynes
All too often, smart city projects focus solely on technical solutions while failing to consider the input and impact on citizens. MK:Smart has turned this on its head and put citizens at the centre of smart city innovation, thus ensuring a bottom-up, community-driven input to the design of the project activities, complementing the top-down specification developed by the project team.
In particular, MK:Smart has developed a unique methodology that combines face-to-face and crowdsourcing activities to support citizen innovation in smart cities. We collected over 6,000 dialogues through face-to-face conversations within communities, and over 7,700 people have visited the award-winning OurMK website, which has been listed as one of the top five crowdfunded initiatives in government affairs by Idox and also won the communications category at the UK Smart City Awards 2017.
We also supported and funded 13 projects, run by citizens, which are creating real change within local communities using Smart City concepts. Notable successes include the MK Food Passport scheme and the gamification of the redways.
You can find out a little bit more about OurMK initiative by watching this video
Get in touch:
Dr Daniel Gooch
The Open University
Dr Janet Van Der Linden
The Open University
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