Even if occasionally advertised, initiatives involving large and
undefined publics (e.g. the citizens of an entire city) for an undefined
duration (i.e. without an a priori definition of the end of
the campaign) have little chance of succeeding in engaging and
stimulating people. This might be overcome by switching to a gamification
approach, which was deliberately discarded in this study
but is under experimentation in similar projects (e.g. Garcia-
Martí et al., 2013). Alternatively, shorter campaigns involving
small and selected user groups (e.g. the technicians of an administration)
are more likely to be successful. People’s ‘‘technological
orientation’’, which reflects a secondary but essential aspect of digital
divide (i.e. the inability of making full use of the available technology),
has also an important role in shaping participation
patterns. In other words, even though using the system’s mobile
application is relatively easy, a further simplification and refinement of its UI (resulting in turn in an increase of usability)
might not be sufficient to recruit a wide range of users.