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Beyond Bureaucracy pp 133–149Cite as

Going Beyond Bureaucracy Through Gamification: Innovation Labs and Citizen Engagement in the Case of “Mapaton” in Mexico City

Part of the Public Administration and Information Technology book series (PAIT,volume 25)

Abstract

Public managers face new challenges to their decision making that extend beyond their current knowledge and prior experiences. To answer these challenges, they need help from actors outside government, including expert citizens. Gamification and innovation labs are emergent strategies to address these knowledge gaps in public administrations, which offer interesting opportunities to engage citizens, but also present important challenges. Using the Technology Enactment Framework and recent theoretical developments on gamification, open data intermediaries, and living labs, this paper analyzes the role of gamification and innovation labs in the public sector. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with public managers, government officials, and other stakeholders involved in an innovation project in Mexico City, called “Mapaton,” which uses gamification techniques to engage citizens in mapping transportation routes. We identify some of the characteristics of gamification as an open innovation strategy in government and explain how gamification and innovation labs help government go beyond traditional bureaucratic structures and rules.

Keywords

  • Gamification
  • Innovation labs
  • Living labs
  • Open innovation
  • Digital government
  • Open government

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. 1.

    A platform of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning of MIT, which allows the generation and real-time updating of information on the transport routes of the city.

  2. 2.

    The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to use that data to write applications.

  3. 3.

    API https://github.com/LabPLC/MapatonAPI.

  4. 4.

    Mapaton Dashboard http://datos.mapatoncd.mx/#1.

  5. 5.

    Database (http://datos.labcd.mx/dataset/mapaton-cdmx-gtfs.

  6. 6.

    GTFS: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference?hl=es#agencytxt.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Autónoma del, Estado de México, Toluca, Mexico

    Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan & David Valle-Cruz

  2. University at Albany, State University of New York, New York, USA

    J. Ramon Gil-Garcia

  3. Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico, Mexico

    J. Ramon Gil-Garcia

Authors
  1. Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan
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  2. J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
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  3. David Valle-Cruz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Computer Aided Automation, Wien, Wien, Austria

    Alois A. Paulin

  2. Project Management Department, Technological Education Inst (TEI), Larissa, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Leonidas G. Anthopoulos

  3. Dept of Public Administration, The Univ of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Prof. Christopher G. Reddick

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Sandoval-Almazan, R., Ramon Gil-Garcia, J., Valle-Cruz, D. (2017). Going Beyond Bureaucracy Through Gamification: Innovation Labs and Citizen Engagement in the Case of “Mapaton” in Mexico City. In: Paulin, A., Anthopoulos, L., Reddick, C. (eds) Beyond Bureaucracy. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54142-6_9

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