A framework for dashboarding city performance : an application to Cascais smart city

Abstract

There has been a recent move to open up the data about the cities and transform it in indicators of interest to share with citizens through online, interactive data visualizations, often termed ‘city dashboards’. This project reflects on the building of dashboards mainly based on open data generated in the smart city context of Cascais. The main goal of these dashboards is to provide detailed information about city performance and trends, without citizens or the managers of the municipality needing to collect or learn how to handle data. These open data and dashboard initiatives are changing not only the relationship between government and the public, but also the way that the municipality is managed. The work begins with a literature review composed by a framework describing the characteristics of a smart city followed by an approach about the open data and a perspective about dashboards. Then, a benchmarking is presented as a means to select a series of indicators that can efficiently capture the performance of the smart city. These indicators will feed the dashboards that will permit to see Cascais as visualized facts, changing the way how managers and citizens know their municipality. The work also identifies the need of a graphic rules manual to follow up in future dashboards in order to achieve coherence in the public share of dashboards by the various departments of Cascais. The project ends with the presentation of a set of key indicators that describe the municipality in several dimensions and with an application case of the constructed dashboards to the open data portal of Cascais.