What does the new era of citizen engagement look like? It's a person spotting graffiti in an alley and using a smart phone to report it to the city with pinpoint accuracy. It's an election day, where voters can track the lines at polling places and avoid the crowds.

In a recent ICMA web conference, Christopher Thomas, director of government markets at Esri (an ICMA Strategic Partner), detailed the community of the future and how local governments will be interwoven with the everyday lives of residents. With new technology that merges geographic information system (GIS) mapping, mobile, and social media applications, local governments are finding ways to improve citizen engagement by repurposing what they are already doing, such as building map data, performing analyses, and eliminating operational inefficiencies.

Thomas opened the session by asking attendees about their level of involvement with citizen engagement applications (apps). The majority of attendees (62 percent) reported that they had yet to develop any citizen engagement apps. An overwhelming majority of participants (91 percent) reported that their local governments had plans to implement citizen engagement apps within the next year.

Citizen engagement, explained Thomas, is not a one-sided distribution of public information. The focus now is on feedback, and this marks a significant shift in the way citizens and governments work together.

Thomas detailed a history of GIS and discussed its progression from the early days of simple data creation and mapping to its development into a strong analytical and operational efficiency tool. The future, as Thomas explained, is really about the merger of local government professionals skilled in applied GIS and start-up communities that are emerging to create a new realm of citizen engagement through geography. 

"Maps are becoming a language," said Thomas. "They are being used in government transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement."

Thomas cited examples of communities and their best practices for using mobile apps to engage citizens. Vanderburgh County, Indiana, saved $85,000 by simply changing from polling places to voting centers and freeing residents to cast their votes at the most convenient location. The county offers a free mobile app to help voters map the centers with the shortest lines.

The city of Reno, Nevada, put a three-month program in place for citizens to comment on where they would like to have bike trails. That app allowed people who have an opinion on the locations of bike trails to communicate on-demand from their proposed location. 

The FCC created an opportunity for citizens to engage and improve infrastructure with a broadband tester. This app allowed people to report back on locations where they had no cell phone service. In the first six months, 1.2 million people downloaded this app.

More information on the webconference is available here.