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Top1. Introduction
This article is an extended version of (Ortner, Mevius, Wiedmann, & Kurz, 2015). Nowadays organizations and public administrations are strongly affected by the so-called digital revolution.
For example, the usage of instant messaging, social media, e-mail and wikis are common ways to transfer internal knowledge (Ortner et al., 2015). Therefore, information technology (IT) influences the interaction of people and leads to a faster exchange of information. As one result, also Smart Cities are confronted with these new challenges.
The term “Smart Cities” has been variously defined and discussed in the literature (Anthopoulos, 2015; Gaggioli, 2014; Neirotti, Marco, Cagliano, Mangano, & Scorrano, 2014; Santis de, Fasano, Mignolli, & Villa, 2014). These definitions have a common aspect of Smart Cities, which is the integration of information technology (IT) into the “daily life” of public administration and citizen interaction.
For this purpose, Smart Cities aim at enabling their citizens to use these digital services, e.g., by providing enhanced web applications and network infrastructures maintained by the public administration (e.g. “Code of America” (Code for America Labs, 2015) and “Free Wireless Hotspots Munich (Stadtwerke München GmbH, 2015)). Furthermore, Smart Cities provide different options of collaboration, e.g., in form of electronic governance (e-governance) to improve internal and external functioning (Boughzala, Janssen, & Assar, 2015). This leads to a closer interaction between the public administration and the citizens (Ma & Xi, 2014). For instance, decisions (e.g. how to use disposable budget) can be made more transparent and fair. Application systems provide a wide set of functionalities supporting the interaction processes of all participants. In fact, several web portals and mobile applications have been developed during the last period in the context of e-public administration.
However, looking beyond technology, a significant lack of interaction and support between “normal” citizens and the public administration still exists. Often, the development of application systems is just focused on the software and hardware implementation (Janssen & Estevez, 2013). Moreover, even if application systems have been used to support interaction processes, the decision making by consensus have not been satisfying. Therefore, the research question is, how the Dialogical Logic approach can enhance the Smart City application systems design?