Towards a Service Platform and Business Model for Mobile Participation

In an attempt to bring citizens closer to governments, electronic participation services are increasingly receiving attention. Despite technological advances regarding smartphones and georeferencing, mobile extensions to e-participation solutions are lacking. We propose a generic service platform called mGeoWiki, which will provide a mobile interface for several participation services. Within this paper, we describe the first stages of the design research cycle, describing the problem and an initial proposed solution. We explicitly design the service concept simultaneously with the underlying business model in order to enhance the chances of eventual market success. Besides the instantiated service platform and business model, we contribute to literature by generating knowledge on how to design service platforms and business models simultaneously. Follow-up research will be conducted in a large, multi-university, international research project focusing on design and evaluation of the service platform and business model.