Abstract:
The study was intended to investigate how government projects are monitored and if citizens can be involved in the monitoring of these projects. The specific objectives of the study were to identify the required parameters for the design and development of a crowdsourcing platform for monitoring government projects, to design and develop a crowdsourcing platform that can enable citizens and the government to interact for effective project monitoring and to evaluate the performance of the developed crowdsourcing platform.
A descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. This method was found appropriate for the study since the study involved collecting data regarding values, behavior, experiences and attitudes of the population under study as well as answering questions on their current status. The target population was officers in the Ministry of Public Works that were involved in project monitoring. The data collection instrument used in this study was a questionnaire and it contained both open and close ended questions. Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics such as frequencies and percentages. Presentation of the findings was in form of tables.
The results revealed that project monitoring was done on a monthly basis which was found to be a very long time to rely on the information for decision making. It also established that project monitoring is carried out solely by government employees and the mode of project monitoring that was used was through site visits.
Based on the findings, the study outlines the development of a mobile application which contains information on government projects. Various components of the government construction projects were developed for ease of gathering information about them. This was to ensure that the citizens and the officers in charge of project monitoring provide vital information concerning the various projects.
Use of maps and photographs was integrated in the application for mapping the projects to their specific locations. The photographs were used for providing visuals of the project at each stage of construction. The results show that citizens and officers in charge of monitoring projects can use the developed mobile application effectively considering the findings of the usability test that were evaluated using efficiency, affect, control, learnability and helpfulness as the subscales.
