Education Between GovTech and Civic Tech

Abstract

In the recent movement towards smart societies, smart governments supported by GovTech and smart cities developed through Civic Tech have become known as dominant structures enabled by information and communications technology. Since GovTech and Civic Tech share the goal of giving citizens better and safer lives through their engagement with government and technology, the development of online public services is characterized by the use of collaborative production methods involving various stakeholders and players. Open data, collaboration, and systematic teamwork are key to understanding this production of heterarchical structures. This study reviews previous cases of collaboration between GovTech and Civic Tech, identifies the dominant mechanisms of the smart society, and summarizes existing pedagogical and industrial theoretical systems, mindsets, and skillsets with the aim of developing content for a university course. Double loop learning, design thinking, the Agile methodology, and the lean principle are identified as theoretical systems. Our findings are arranged so that they can be applied in the content of a university-level educational technology course, which we designed to develop students’ transformative competencies to enable them to become active citizens. In addition, we compared the processes involved in observed theoretical systems and conventional pedagogical theories to clarify the differences in their mechanisms. We conclude with a discussion of the need to recognize frameworks of different paradigms to prepare students for transformative social activities.