Pattern Recognition of New Urban Technologies from the Perspective of Experts and Officials(Study case: Volunteer Geographic Information Systems (VGIS) Technologies)

The concept of citizen participation is not new. Today, there is a greater desire to employ modern participatory technologies, with population or community-based strategies, such as participatory volunteered location-based crowdsourcing (VGIS) software to make the cities smarter. Because, in addition to being location-based, the system is voluntary and can simultaneously collect humans’ data. However, there is no precise understanding of how experts are going to execute this method in practice; thus, this study helps to fill this important research gap. The objective of this research is to determine the key factors that have a significant impact on the adoption and utilization of new volunteer crowdsourcing technologies, specifically location-based systems like volunteered geographic information (VGI), as a means of crowdsourcing in urban management, as viewed by both researchers and officials. The research, in terms of its practical goal and nature, is descriptive-analytical. In this study, two qualitative methods, Delphi and the quantitative survey questionnaire, were used sequentially and their results were combined. The results were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis by SPSS software to extract the main components. The research results show that, according to researchers, the most important and effective factors for the successful design and implementation of the voluntary geographic information system technology and its acceptance by citizens are citizens. However, according to municipal officials and experts, the most important factor is organizational and institutional factors, which refer to policy-making and legal support. In fact, municipal officials and experts believe that in order for citizens to accept voluntary location-based technology, the path should be determined by top-level officials first.