Open Goverment, citizen/PA collaboration, blockchain-mediated incentivization

1. 1
AUDABLOK: Engaging Citizens in Open
Data Refinement through Blockchain
13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence
(UCAmI 2019)
2 – 5 December 2019, Toledo, Spain, http://mamilab.esi.uclm.es/ucami2019/
Dr. Diego López-de-Ipiña González-de-Artaza
dipina@deusto.es
http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/dipina
http://www.morelab.deusto.es
@dipina

2. 2
Motivation I
• Continuous engagement of users in Smart
Cities/Environments is hard to achieve !!!
– Use case: Open Government Data (OGP) offers a
high innovation potential (transparency,
accountability, value creation)
• BUT, its take-up has been lower than expected
• Why?
– Long-term sustainability of user collaboration
processes is an ISSUE!

3. 3
Motivation II: Beyond Open Data
Government Portals
CITIZENS have
NO SKILLS or TOOLS to
utilize COMPLEX DATA
LOW BENEFITS
from OPEN DATA
published by CITIES

4. 4
Background
• AUDABLOK based on our previous work
towards more democratized e-services
through the involvement of citizens,
– E.g. by commenting and annotation promoted
through gamification and human computation
• SIMPATICO H2020 project

5. 5
Background: Human Computation
• Citizenpedia, in charge of
performing Human Computation:
– Question & Answer Engine (QAE):
tool used by citizens to post and
resolve questions regarding e-
services and Public Administration
– Collaborative Procedure Designer
(CPD): offers graphical tools to the
civil servants and stakeholders to
collaborate on the design of
administrative procedures
– Servicepedia: integrates all the data
of the QAE, CPD and e-services to
contextualize the existing questions,
answers and procedure steps.

6. 6
Crowdsourcing & gamification are not
enough to truly engage users …
• Civil servants are reluctant to moderate the
contents provided by end-users
• End users are usually initially motivated, but their
contributions are diminished in time:
– Receiving no feedback is discouraging
– If the benefit is not clear or reward immediate →
eventually user contributions diminish
• Conclusion: Human Computation is appealing but
requires (moderation + automatic quality
assessment) and continuous high involvement

7. 7
AUDABLOK: User-engagement for
for Data Refinement
• AUDABLOK explores how to turn consumers of open
data (public services) into prosumers:
– refining and enhancing contents, through incentivized
crowdsourcing, encouraging more proactive users
• Software framework to make open government data
portals increasable evolvable and sustainable in
time. HOW?
– By combining Human Computation & Internet of People
– KISS principle: Pull Request combined with Blockchain

8. 8
AUDABLOK: catalyser of Human
Computation

9. 9
Engagement driven by Incentivization
• AUDABLOK improves citizen collaboration through
incentivisation (token economy) and recognition,
i.e., trustworthy recording of citizen collaborations
– Blockchain is used to deal with rewarding and recognition
aspects, i.e. higher co-creation of citizens

10. 10
Continuous
Engagement =
Pull request +
Blockchain

11. 11
AUDABLOK: Technical solution
• Integrate:
– Ethereum —an open source, public, blockchain-based
distributed computing platform and operating system
featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality—into
– CKAN open data management software—an open source
tool which makes data accessible by providing tools to
streamline publishing, sharing, finding, and using data.
• AUDABLOK behaves as smart oracle which feeds
Ethereum network, recording citizen-initiated Open
Data refinement transactions

12. 12
AUDABLOK: Architecture

13. 13
Data Lifecycle registration
• AUDABLOK-enhanced CKAN
registers the following data
lifecycle events: NEW, CHANGED,
DELETED, PULL_REQUEST,
PULL_REQUEST_ACCEPTED &
PULL_REQUEST_REJECTED:
– New resource: checksum of the file
– Resource modification: checksum of
diff between original and new files
– Resource deletion: file is marked as
deleted

14. 14
CKAN Blockchain Integration Module
• Agnostic to Blockchain network → 1st version over Ethereum
• Adoption of Blockchain has a cost, you need ether to record
transactions
– costs related to the publication of datasets are covered by an account
belonging to the public administration
• Blockchain does not work in real-time:
– transaction duration on Ethereum depends on the gas price that the
user pays when performing a transaction
• Activities carried out:
1. Integration of user accounts with accounts from blockchain protocol
2. Writing and reading in the blockchain
3. Reward management support
4. Interaction with the smart contracts

15. 15
Citizen-collaboration module
• The publication of new datasets has been
performed following the by-default process defined
in CKAN, which has been instrumented to register
new dataset transactions in blockchain.
• Contributions to existing datasets have been defined
through an AUDABLOK enabled new process
– Based on Github pull request concept
• This process is carried in a completely unobtrusive
manner through a set of web forms integrated with
CKAN: a) fork, b) pull_request and c) merge

16. 16
Citizen-collaboration module

17. 17
Data-exploitation module
• Manages everything related with monetizing data and
services provided by AUDABLOK
– allows public administrations to reward users for their contributions to
the datasets
• Mechanisms for developers and data scientists to promote
their smart contracts, which implement the algorithms that
can be executed over the data available in the repository
• Within the “data exploitation module”, two smart contracts
have been provided:
– Audablok and Audacoin contracts

18. 18
Validation
• Solution deployed in Ropsten Testnet
– testing network that runs the same protocol as
Ethereum does and is used to testing purposes
before deploying on the main network (Mainnet)
• Connected to Ethereum network through
Infura:
– A hosted Ethereum node cluster that lets your
users run your application without requiring them
to set up their own Ethereum node or wallet

19. 19
Conclusion
• AUDABLOK is a solution based on blockchain in order to
support the transparency and accountability principles of
open government
– CKAN+Ethereum to provide trustful recording of citizen contributions
to open data portal enhancements and to grant rewards to citizens
• Blockchain is a disruptive technology for Open Government
which is meant to provide a verifiable, immutable, traceable,
and decentralized registry of transactions.
– It can reliably trace user contributions to data and participation in co-
creation processes
– Enabling the development of novel business models based on the
collaboration and partnership of government and its stakeholders

20. 20
Further Work
• Deploy this system through a real open data portal
and the actual Ethereum network (mainnet)
• Extend the “data exploitation module”, so that a
monetization scheme for open data portals can be
enabled
• Expand AUDABLOK application to ubiquitous
computing infrastructure , e.g., recycling, usage of
public transport, and so on
– Citizens would be rewarded when contributing to the city
objectives

21. 21
AUDABLOK: Engaging Citizens in Open
Data Refinement through Blockchain
13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence
(UCAmI 2019)
2 – 5 December 2019, Toledo, Spain, http://mamilab.esi.uclm.es/ucami2019/
Dr. Diego López-de-Ipiña González-de-Artaza
dipina@deusto.es
http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/dipina
http://www.morelab.deusto.es
@dipina