Title: Leveraging universal social networking and the IoT for urban-scale participatory systems

The document is divided in three main chapters. In Chapter 1, a survey on Civic Technology with a focus on participatory democracy is presented, analysing the recent advances in the field, under the perspectives of governmental practices, community organization and urban-scale applications. Furthermore, civic engagement is being analysed as a general term. In Chapter 2, a networking perspective is analysed, based on Named Data Networking, to be integrated with social middleware, as an alternative content-based networking solution. Integration of NDN with the already known Universal Social Network Bus is proposed as a communication paradigm and social middleware for social networking applications. Finally, in Chapter 3, a new paradigm based on already proposed Social Participation Networks is extended, to provide a generic approach for defining entities and rules for online social interactions, by structuring social graphs that support multiple participatory contexts, for multiple online social networking abstractions.