Page 68 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Executive Summary

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 on 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 has served as an important means to
implement 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 opening 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 organisations 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 7 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, yellow dust alert,
among others.

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