Page 48 - Enhancing innovation and participation in smart sustainable cities

United for Smart Sustainable Cities
Enhancing Innovation and Participation

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

Seoul is inhabited by 20% (10 million) of the Korean population. The city accounts for 25% of the South Korean
GDP. During the process of rapid urbanization, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has successfully built
advanced IT environments, excellent urban infrastructures and solid administrative systems, in order to improve
the quality of its citizens’ lives. However, as society becomes more complex due to various environmental, cultural,
political and economic factors, cities are faced with a wide array of urban problems that the government cannot
solve on its own. To solve these problems effectively, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has found it
necessary to transform itself into a civic-led administrative body, which can ensure that citizens’ opinions are
reflected in policies, departing from the conventional government-led top-down policy. As such, the government
started providing civic services based on participation, communication and information sharing with its citizens.
Since Mayor Won-soon Park took office in October 2011, the government has launched such efforts in earnest.
Mayor Won-soon Park believes in the administrative philosophy that "Citizens are the mayors". He has taken the
lead on creating a "citizen-participatory platform", aimed at implementing all policies based on civic participation
and cooperative governance. Information technologies have served as an important means to implementing this
administrative philosophy. In particular, a high penetration of smart devices (over 90%) as well as the rapid
expansion of social media, have made significant contributions to improving citizen involvement in policy setting.
Due to the positive impact of such technological and social changes, citizens have requested to promote access to
ICTs and guarantee more civic participation. Accordingly, SMG has put more emphasis on open administration and
open public data to increase its accountability and transparency.

1.2 Challenge and response
Prior to the development of the Seoul Open Data Plaza, SMG already had a vast collection of public data on
transportation, environment, education, culture and more. The general public however could not access this
meaningful and useful data as by law, public organizations were only required to provide data when requested.

In December 2009, a high school student developed a Seoul bus application, which served as the first mobile
application that provided real-time information on buses in Seoul. It was met with a lot of enthusiasm; however,
as Seoul’s data was not made available to the public, the application was missing critical information for it to
properly serve its full purpose. As a result of this, many citizens who used the application started filing civil
complaints to SMG and requested that public data be made readily available. This pushed for making data from
public organizations available to the general public.
The Seoul Open Data Plaza (data.seoul.go.kr) was launched in May 2012 as a unified portal that provided a wide
range of processed data in various formats. It was developed in response to citizens’ desire to make public data
available and because SMG wanted to strengthen the accountability and transparency of urban governance. Using
this portal, SMG aimed to improve the quality of public services through a bottom-up approach. This was achieved
by providing a platform that enables citizens, start-ups and institutions to directly develop services and create
economic and social values.
The data provided on the portal is classified into 10 distinct categories: General Administration, Culture & Tourism,
Environment, Health, Industry & Economy, Urban Planning, Welfare, Transportation, Safety & Education. This data
has also been made available in seven different formats to help citizens choose the best way to use the data. It
also provides a data visualization service which allows citizens to input public data and get visualized data.

The Seoul Open Data Plaza has enabled smart governance and empowered students, companies and regular
citizens to develop services that can improve citizens’ lives. Some applications that were developed through the
datasets on the Open Data Plaza include a subway real-time alarm, bus application, and yellow dust alert, among
others.

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