Removing barriers for citizen participation to urban innovation

The potential of open data as a resource for driving citizen-led urban innovation relies not only on a suitable technical infrastructure but also on the skills and knowledge of the citizens themselves. This paper describes how a smart city project in Milton Keynes, UK, is supporting multiple stages of citizen innovation, from ideation through to citizen-led smart city projects. This approach encounters challenges when engaging with citizens in identifying and implementing data-driven solutions to urban problems. The majority of citizens have little practical experience with the types of data sets that might be available, nor possess the appropriate skills for their analysis and utilisation for addressing urban issues, or finding novel ways to hack their city. We go on to describe the Urban Data School, which aims to offer a long-term solution to this problem by providing teaching resources around urban data sets aimed at raising the standard of data literacy amongst future generations. Lesson resources that form part of the Urban Data School have been piloted in a primary and two secondary schools in Milton Keynes.