The Rise of Civic Tech and Its Impact on Meetings, Conventions and Tourism

One of the themes in Skift’s 2016 Megatrends report looked at the “Cities As Platform” concept, whereby governments are developing digital platforms to facilitate two-way engagement between policy makers and citizens. There is a lot of innovation in civic tech in 2016. In the best of cases, cities are evolving into urban operating systems, which presents some potentially interesting opportunities in both the leisure travel and conventions sectors, above and beyond the proliferation of “smart” transportation apps. One early example of that is discussed in the Skift post: How the Rise of Smart Cities is Impacting Travel and Tourism. But to understand the potential implications of city platforms on travel and tourism, a little background is required first. Government-backed digital platforms come primarily in two forms. There are "open data" platforms with raw datasets designed for business, scientific, government, media, and academic use. Examples include the Paris, Los Angeles and New York open data portals, where anyone can source information such as: neighborhoods with the most foreclosed homes, permits for special events, number of long-term vacation rentals, etc. The second type of government platform focuses on citizen engagement, or "citizensourcing." It's a transparent framework for locals to submit ideas about how to make cities more efficient at improving overall quality of life and more effective at formulating development strategy. Two good examples of those are Madam Mayor, I Have an Idea in Paris, and MyMedellin Co-Created City in Colombia. Others include SpeakUp Austin and Better Reykjavik. "We tend to think of gove