Vicus - a persona for towns

Digitization of towns in concepts such as "Smart Cities" pose a new challenge for software engineering. Software is usually developed for selected target groups, represented as personas with clear requirements. But solutions for cities or smaller towns affect all its inhabitants directly, so that performing stakeholder identification and prioritization based on characterizations such as personas will not do justice to all these stakeholders. Conversely, the government, industry and citizens of each town have specific interests, properties and needs, which can and must be understood when realizing new solutions for a town. This paper proposes a new elicitation and analysis method in the form of a so-called Vicus, through which a town can be characterized by gathering relevant information about a town. The Vicus facilitates the generation of new creative ideas as well as the reuse of already successfully implemented solutions in towns that reveal similar patterns in their characterization.