Abstract
Electronic participation tools are becoming increasingly popular among citizens as a means of communication with the authorities. Residents actively use dedicated websites and mobile applications to send electronic appeals on problems of the urban environment. In some big cities, it can be hundreds of thousands and even millions of messages annually. Big data allows for the analysis of civic activity and subjective perception of the environment by residents.
In this paper, we studied the data of a popular Russian portal called Our St. Petersburg, which provides means for interaction between residents and organizations responsible for the elimination of environmental defects.
A distribution of user activity was built based on the number of messages sent by them, which made it possible to identify groups of the most active participants. We identified the preferences of “activists” and “ordinary residents” among the most popular categories of complaints. It was found that activists are more likely to pay attention to citywide problems (for example, urban environment violations on the streets), while the majority of users are more focused on the problems of housing and communal services related to their apartment and house.
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Acknowledgment
This research is financially supported by The Russian Science Foundation, Agreement №. 17-71-30029 with co-financing of Bank Saint Petersburg.
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Kudinov, S., Ilina, E., Antonov, A. (2020). Analyzing Civic Activity in the Field of Urban Improvement and Housing Maintenance Based on E-Participation Data: St. Petersburg Experience. In: Chugunov, A., Khodachek, I., Misnikov, Y., Trutnev, D. (eds) Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia. EGOSE 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1135. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39296-3_7
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