Designing People-Centric Smart Government Ecosystems for the Citiverse Era: A Conceptual Framework for Multi-Stakeholder Engagement and Public Value Creation

Smart government research emphasizes people-centric, data-driven governance, yet conceptual fragmentation persists over how socio-technical systems, multi-level governance, and Citiverse environments interact. This article proposes a People-Centric Smart Government Ecosystem Framework that reconceptualizes smart government as a socio-technical system structured along two dimensions: (1) three horizontal pillars, People, Process, and Technology (PPT), and (2) a vertical, four-layer governance structure comprising strategic, tactical, operational, and service (citizen-facing) levels. Drawing on organizational systems theory and Activity Theory, the framework defines people-centricity as a property that spans internal government actors and external stakeholders. It differentiates digital intelligence capabilities across governance layers, including policy recommendation systems, decision support systems, operational information systems, and citizen-facing service interfaces. Methodologically, the study combines a structured literature review with iterative coding and thematic clustering of constructs, cross-layer mapping, and conceptual modeling. An application to Indonesia's digital government reform agenda demonstrates how the framework can be used to diagnose cross-layer alignment gaps and inform design choices in developing-country contexts. The Citiverse is positioned as a future-oriented extension rather than a structural requirement, enabling the framework to remain technology-neutral while extensible to immersive governance scenarios. The study contributes an integrative, people-centric, and ecosystem-oriented foundation for advancing smart government theory and practice.