FixMyStreet Brussels: Socio-Demographic Inequality in Crowdsourced Civic Participation

FixMyStreet (FMS) is a web-based civic participation platform that allows citizens to report environmental defects like potholes and damaged pavements to the government. In this paper, we examine the use of FMS in Brussels, the capital city of Belgium. Analyzing a total of 30,041 reports since its inception in 2013, we demonstrate how civic participation on FMS varies between the ethnically diverse districts in Brussels. We compare FMS usage to a range of socio-demographic indicators derived from official city statistics as well as geotagged social media data from Twitter. Our statistical analysis revealed several significant differences between the districts in so far as to suggest that crowd-sourced civic participation platforms tend to marginalize low-income and ethnically diverse communities. In this respect, our findings provide timely evidence to inform the design of more inclusive crowd-sourced, civic participation platforms in the future.

Publication year:2017

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BOF-publication weight:6

CSS-citation score:2

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open