“How do we measure our success?” Bertha Peters-Scheepers, operations manager of marketing & communications at the Johannesburg Roads Agency, ponders this for a second. Then she answers: “Our ROI is citizen happiness.”

The answer sounds more like a soundbite than a legitimate metric. But out of all the aspects that measure the delivery of smart city projects, citizen satisfaction is arguably the most important. It’s a problem highlighted in a TED Talk by Alessandra Orofino, co-founder of Meu Rio, a Brazilian platform to enable citizen activism.