# A Point of View on New Education for Smart Citizenship
## 1 Introduction  
New technologies have a huge impact on social life [1; 2], changing (i) the quality of personal relationships [3; 4]; (ii) the concept of proximity [5]; (iii) the idea of authority; (iv) privacy; (v)liberty; (vi) economy [6]; and (vii) democracy.  
Many authors have reflected on the impact of new technologies on personal lives and on the concept of being a citizen: as new technologies are always information-rooted, considerations have been made in terms of the right of being skilled enough to cope with modernity [7; 8] and on the respect of rights in the digital society.  
The role of smart technologies in social participation [9; 10; 11] has also been widely explored and discussed, as well as how they improve and empower citizens' initiative, proactivity, and involvement efforts.  
The aim of this paper is to address the issue of \"being an active and conscious citizen\" (in all the accepted meanings of this expression) from a different perspective. Information technologies use and create data spaces: a plurality of repositories and databases keep citizens' memories, creating a sort of _digital territory_ that any modern citizen is obliged to inhabit. Among traditional citizenship dimensions, new rights, linked to these new digital territories, have to be granted: awareness of potential dangers is the main element to achieve, as citizens usually fail to recognize the smart service costs, mainly focused on privacy and freedom.  
The underlying idea is that citizens cannot be fully integrated into a modern society without a clear image of their position and role in digital spaces. In this sense, when asking or using smartservices and intelligent territories, citizens ought to be aware (i) of the processes (mainly informative and induced by the services they use) involving communities and individuals; and (ii) of their real body boundaries in this unprecedented information territory. The effects of the presence of a person in digital territories may, in fact, deeply impact their lives, relationships and personal security.  
The deep gap existing between stakeholders' languages may hamper these goals. Technicians in charge of the design and construction of smart infrastructure and services are (and often are pleased to be) beyond the comprehension of other citizens: a consequence is that an increasing component of common experiences is outside the citizens' control, vigilance, and awareness. In this work, we advance the idea that natural language, when linked to technology basics, may be a powerful instrument for achieving social consciousness and broad recognition of technology costs and benefits. This point is hardly surprising as linguistic competency is traditionally a core capability for full citizenship [12; 13]: in this paper, this idea is developed and updated for the smart citizens' benefit.  
In this perspective, an original educational proposal is advanced and some experiences discussed. The aim is to achieve a methodology, based on conceptual modeling, for addressing new citizenship issues, adopting different and converging perspectives: narrations, data, IT, and measures. The final goal is to induce in young students (and in their teachers) the idea that, in order to be an active citizen in modern society, all of these skills must act together, sharing a common language [14].  
The paper is organized as follows: after a brief focus on the complexity paradigm, the concept of multidimensional citizenship in a knowledge space is discussed. With this in mind, the paper analyses the strategic role of natural language and conceptual modeling and presents some applications and lesson examples.