Author Archives: Franka Grubisic

In the lead up to my master thesis, I’ve acquired knowledge in computer engineering and geospatial sciences and a grown passion for public transport. Now being a student of Computer Science specializing in Open e-Government, I wanted to utilize everything I know and love into the thesis.

This thesis addresses the pressing need for an efficient public transport system in response to increasing urban population and rising fossil fuel costs. The research aims to satisfy that need by answering the research question guiding this study is: “How can developing an SDI-based conceptual model, leveraging cloud computing, optimize public transport by integrating multiple travel data sources and overcoming data fragmentation and interoperability challenges?“.

The outcome of this study is the development of an integrated conceptual model that leverages SDI and digitalization to optimize public transport systems. The model offers a comprehensive solution by addressing the limitations of traditional transport planning methods, integrating multiple data sources, technologies, and stakeholders within an SDI framework. The model demonstrates efficacy, efficiency, and practical significance, setting the stage for further research and advancements in transport planning and optimization.

You can read the thesis here.

Recognizing that current top-down smart city solutions fail to address urban complexities and citizen needs, as a part of Open and Big Data Management course, I’ve decided to write about the role that VGI plays in city infrastructure and its influence on urban service experiences.

Today’s hunter-gatherers engage in almost every pastime thanks to a number of technological advances, including popular mobile phones and free apps. These smart devices and citizen’s data might be utilised for the benefit of all, by collecting VGI and using it to improve the city’s service infrastructure to better meet citizen needs.

By exploring the role of VGI, it has been found that VGI is fitted for the purpose as it offers mechanisms to examine behaviors, trends, and problems that may arise or are already present in a city, and by enabling VGI collection via a government app that pairs smart devices and wearables, the app not only increased government accessibility and reach of the previously unengaged citizens, but has illustrated how VGI may as readily be co-opted by political goals as it is in informing policy. However, even with the high promises of VGI in theory, it could still end up being under-used in practice due to public management approaches.

Read the essay here.

During the last decade, an outpouring of measures in the public sector sphere has happened to facilitate ‘transformation process driven by design, to integrate design in the organisation and develop design capability and design culture’ (Holmlid & Malmberg, 2018) in order to meet the needs of citizens.

With this in mind, for my Master’s course Decision Making and Business Intelligence, I’ve decided to write an essay about two different approaches to collaboration in the public sector – rational and creative.

Whereas the rational approach to policymaking is based on deduction, induction, objectivity and analysis of the evidence at hand, the design thinking approach is anything but. It’s charachterised by innovation, collaboration and creativity. Even though such work is still largely confusing for the public sector and its decision makers due to the difference in culture, it is still a powerful tool that has the capability to solve public issues.

This essay hence explores the role of collaborative design methods, specifically focusing on decision making, and the differences they make in contrast to current rational and systematic-decision making processes in the public sector. It concludes that, when using design thinking as a complement to policy making, it works to improve the traditional ways of policy thinking and policy design, but its implementation largely depends on design readiness and maturity of the organisation – in order words, how it is operationalised and used in practice by governments and other key policy actors.

You can read the essay here.

Recognising that recently there has been a heightened interest in understanding how public spaces play a role in knowledge sharing acquisition within the urban design and planning and knowledge management field, as a part of my Knowledge Management course, I’ve explored how proactive knowledge capture can improve public services.

The goal of this essay was to discuss the outcome of knowledge creation and sharing in public spaces and to analyse how it can be captured and used as input for creating or improving public services. In doing so, the public sector, the citizens, the public space and public services have been observed through the socio-technical frame and the question: “How is knowledge created and shared in their interdependent interaction?”.

The results show that the outcome of knowledge creation and sharing in public spaces is often “knowledge missed” – a missed opportunity by the public sector to capture and use that knowledge to improve public services. Possible mechanisms for knowledge capture, as well as future research directions, have been presented and discussed.

Read the essay here.

During the last year of my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, my passion for the public sector grew so I have decided to write my final thesis on that topic, supervised by Joep Crompvoets, full professor at the Public Governance Institute of KU Leuven and senior lecturer Predrag Suka from my alma mater.

In the thesis, I studied the intersection of service, urban and transition design within the public sector, set up to create a value mapping tool for strengthening co-creation in public services.

The proposed co-creation model and the value mapping tool work in synergy and are envisioned to be used together. With this orchestrated use, the tool does not only strengthen co-creation in public services but offers actionable points for future development. It helps identify citizen’s area of interest related to a specific problem by utilising transition design and the introduced the concept of spatial touchpoints and value statements. The end output are key action points left to public service managers to tackle later on – but in this case the journey might be more important than the destination.

You can read the thesis here.