The Rise of Civic Tech and Its Impact on Meetings, Conventions and Tourism
Photo Credit: Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (lower left) is home to this year's Smart Cities Asia conference, which will implement the CitizenLab community engagement platform. KLCC
Skift Take
The CitizenLab platform fills the need in conventions today for an affordable, scalable community engagement tool connecting conference delegates and exhibitors with local citizens and policy makers.
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 Par
