On Managing the Social Components in a Smart City

Recent technological and societal developments, reflected in the appearance of Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Crowdsourcing and the shift towards a sharing economy, put the humans in the position not only to consume the services, provide data or execute simple (computational) tasks, but also to actively engage and shape the hybrid collaborative activities. These changes are opening up the possibilities for novel forms of interaction, collaboration and organization of labor. This becomes especially relevant in the context of the Smart City, where the focus is shifting from optimizing physical infrastructure and resource savings to include empowerment of citizens and support for neighborhood-scale complex/creative human collaborations. The expectation is that such collective activities can bring a disruptive change to the society. In this paper we present our vision for initiating and managing socially-driven collaborations in a Smart City context by considering research challenges related primarily to the human-centric aspects of the said collaborations.