In information technology (IT), there is an increasing demand for professionals. However, recruiters need help hiring qualified professionals due to intense competition and a lack of information about the ones seeking employment. This work uses the Engagement by Design to reflect on a solution for hiring IT professionals focusing on crowdsourcing using engagement concepts. This study aims to identify the opportunities and challenges of using Engagement by Design to create an innovative solution for hiring an IT professional. The study made it possible to identify some items that can improve user engagement in a program aimed at recruiting and retaining IT talent.

Technology companies increasingly need to recruit and select qualified Information Technology professionals, as the technology market is fast-paced, and there is a shortage of these professionals. We used Design Thinking supported by remote communication technologies to reflect on this problem and generate solutions. In this context, we seek to answer: What are the opportunities and challenges when using Design Thinking to support the creation of an innovative solution for recruiting and selecting Information Technology professionals suitable for the market’s demands? We found that the main opportunities are to identify and integrate different profiles of professionals in the same environment in the selective process. The main challenges were contacting and recruiting participants during the COVID19 pandemic, developing solutions quickly, and applying the ideas generated in building a prototype for recruiting Information Technology professionals to meet market demand.

Urban population growth creates problems such as congestion and resource scarcity. These problems contribute to poor quality of life and negative environmental impacts. In this context, Information and Communication Technologies appear to improve sustainability solutions. Smart Mobility emerges as a dimension of the Smart City and includes technologies and applications that assist transport services. Among these services, the applications directed to the cyclist segment stand out. In our work, we present a review of bicycle applications, and we perform a comparative function analysis and their relationship with the factors that contribute to the practice of cycling filtering the most relevant functions. We aim to find the most attractive features for urban cyclists and the limitations of what is offered in the market. In addition, we will provide guidance to improve the development of cycling apps and the implementation of new features, collaborating with the development of new technologies and future research.

Nowadays, applications that use crowdsourcing are becoming more and more widespread. However, for the solution to be successful, it needs to go beyond usage, users must be engaged with them. User’s engagement (UE) is the quality of user experience in applications that highlights the good aspects of their interaction and failing at engage users can be crucial to a system. We have developed an 18-cards deck that provides domain-specific insights for designers on user engagement in crowdsourcing initiatives. We have applied the cards in three online design workshops, offer participants insights, findings that were lifted in the workshop, and discuss how they support to advance of the design research and design practice in crowdsourcing initiatives in the context of engagement.

The use of Crowdsourcing to solve public problems is called Citizen-Sourcing and shows the potential to increase citizen participation in the context of e-government. Successful implementations of Citizen-Sourcing applications require the citizen to continuously engage with each other and with the government through these applications. In general, citizens expect, among other things, that the government responds to their comments in an application by immediately solving the problems pointed out or indicating when and how they would be solved. In a literature review, we could not find any model for adequately assessing the quality of the service provided by local e-governments for citizens in Citizen-Sourcing scenarios. Hence, we propose an approach to analyze the quality of the government's response to the citizen through Citizen-Sourcing applications. To validate the proposed approach, we have conducted a case study using real data collected from Colab.re, a Citizen-Sourcing application very popular in Brazil. Our main contributions are a novel approach to assess the quality of interaction between local e-government and citizen and a detailed discussion regarding a local e-government's action in the platform.