Proof of witness presence: Blockchain consensus for augmented democracy in smart cities

Abstract

Smart Cities evolve into complex and pervasive urban environments with a citizens' mandate to meet sustainable development goals. Repositioning democratic values of citizens' choices in these complex ecosystems has turned out to be imperative in an era of social media filter bubbles, fake news and opportunities for manipulating electoral results with such means. This paper introduces a new paradigm of augmented democracy that promises actively engaging citizens in a more informed decision-making augmented into public urban space. The proposed concept is inspired by a digital revive of the Ancient Agora of Athens, an arena of public discourse, a Polis where citizens assemble to actively deliberate and collectively decide about public matters. The core contribution of the proposed paradigm is the concept of proving witness presence: making decision-making subject of providing secure evidence and testifying for choices made in the physical space. This paper shows how the challenge of proving witness presence can be tackled with blockchain consensus to empower citizens' trust and overcome security vulnerabilities of GPS localization. Moreover, a novel platform for collective decision-making and crowd-sensing in urban space is introduced: Smart Agora. It is shown how real-time collective measurements over citizens' choices can be made in a fully decentralized and privacy-preserving way. Witness presence is tested by deploying a decentralized system for crowd-sensing the sustainable use of transport means. Furthermore, witness presence of cycling risk is validated using o cial accident data from public authorities, which are compared against wisdom of the crowd. The paramount role of dynamic consensus, self-governance and ethically aligned artificial intelligence in the augmented democracy paradigm is outlined.

Ethics of Smart Cities: Towards Value-Sensitive Design and Co-Evolving City Life

“…Within the FuturICT 2.0 project, the Nervousnet concept was further extended by a multi-dimensional incentive system. This would consider externalities and risks, which are measurable by the Internet of Things or social proofs [115]. Specifically, the FuturICT 2.0 project proposed a socio-ecological finance system called "Finance 4.0" [116], for which a demonstrator (http://www.finfour.net, accessed on 28 August 2021) was built.…”

“…A human-centred smart city with built-in human values would foster learning not only on an individual level but also on a collective level. The EPOS project [115,157] is a research endeavour harnessing this concept. There, collective learning is realised within decision-support systems that assist citizens to choose among several options.…”

Research on Collaborative Governance of Smart Government Based on Blockchain Technology: An Evolutionary Approach

“…Local governments can refer to the mentioned studies in their decision-making to assess the possibility of applying blockchain technology to government services in their regions. At the microscopic level, existing studies primarily assessed security concerns in governmental use of blockchain technology [25], the application of blockchain to e-Residency [26], blockchain and big data combine to elevate the level of urban governance and social information [12,27], financial network governance and freight assessment [28][29][30], and smart city governance [31,32]. As a research hotspot in the multidisciplinary field, such a type of research covers most aspects of the development of "blockchain + government service," whereas it lacks systematic and dynamic research methods.…”

(So) Big Data and the transformation of the city

“…Figure 26 illustrates a visualization of such a deployment. DIAS is connected with several front-end systems, such as GDELT [75,97] and the Smart Agora platform [88].…”