smart city

Value and Vulnerability: The Internet of Things in a Connected State Government

Curated on June 2, 2016October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pressrelease: “The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) today released a policy brief on the Internet of Things (IoT) in state government. The paper focuses on the different ways state governments are using IoT now and in the future and the policy considerations involved.

“In NASCIO’s 2015 State CIO Survey, we asked state CIOs to what extent IoT was on their agenda. Just over half said they were in informal discussions, however only one in five had moved to the formal discussion phase. We believe IoT needs to be a formal part of each state’s policy considerations,” explained NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson.

The paper encourages state CIOs to make IoT part of the enterprise architecture discussions on asset management and risk assessment and to develop an IoT roadmap.

“Cities and municipalities have been working toward the designation of ‘smart city’ for a while now,” said Darryl Ackley, cabinet secretary for the New Mexico Department of Information Technology and NASCIO president. “While states provide different services than cities, we are seeing a lot of activity around IoT to improve citizen services and we see great potential for growth. The more organized and methodical states can be about implementing IoT, the more successful and useful the outcomes.”

Read the policy brief at www.NASCIO.org/ValueAndVulnerability “

How to implement “open innovation” in city government

Curated on May 25, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Victor Mulas at the Worldbank: “City officials are facing increasingly complex challenges. As urbanization rates grow, cities face higher demand for services from a larger and more densely distributed population. On the other hand, rapid changes in the global economy are affecting cities that struggle to adapt to these changes, often resulting in economic depression and population drain.

“Open innovation” is the latest buzz word circulating in forums on how to address the increased volume and complexity of challenges for cities and governments in general.

But, what is open innovation?

Traditionally, public services were designed and implemented by a group of public officials. Open innovation allows us to design these services with multiple actors, including those who stand to benefit from the services, resulting in more targeted and better tailored services, often implemented through partnership with these stakeholders. Open innovation allows cities to be more productive in providing services while addressing increased demand and higher complexity of services to be delivered.

New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam and many other cities have been experimenting with this concept, introducing challenges for entrepreneurs to address common problems or inviting stakeholders to co-create new services. Open innovation has gone from being a “buzzword” to another tool in the city officials’ toolbox.

However, even cities that embrace open innovation are still struggling to implement it beyond a few specific areas. This is understandable, as introducing open innovation practically requires a new way of doing things for city governments, which tend to be complex and bureaucratic organizations.

Counting with an engaged mayor is not enough to bring this kind of transformation. Changing the behavior of city officials requires their buy-in, it can’t be done top down

We have been introducing open innovation to cities and governments for the last three years in Chile, Colombia, Egypt and Mozambique. We have addressed specific challenges and iteratively designed and tested a systematic methodology to introduce open innovation in government through both a top-down and a bottom-up approaches. We have tested this methodology in Colombia (Cali, Barranquilla and Manizales) and Chile (metropolitan area of Gran Concepción). We have identified “internal champions” (i.e., government officials who advocate the new methodology), and external stakeholders organized in an “innovation hub” that provides long-term sustainability and scalability of interventions. We believe that this methodology is easily applicable beyond cities to other government entities at the regional and national levels. …To understand how the methodology practically works, we describe in this report the process and its results in its application in the city area of Gran Concepción, in Chile. For this activity, the urban transport sector was selected and the target of intervention were the regional and municipal government departments in charge or urban transport in the area of Gran Concepción. The activity in Chile resulted in a threefold impact:

It catalyzed the adoption of the bottom-up smart city model following this new methodology throughout Chile; and
It expanded the implementation and mainstreaming of the methodologies developed and tested through this activity in other World Bank projects.

More information about this activity in Chile can be found in the Smart City Gran Concepcion webpage…(More)”

Smart crowds in smart cities: real life, city scale deployments of a smartphone based participatory crowd management platform

Curated on May 25, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tobias Franke, Paul Lukowicz and Ulf Blanke at the Journal of Internet Services and Applications: “Pedestrian crowds are an integral part of cities. Planning for crowds, monitoring crowds and managing crowds, are fundamental tasks in city management. As a consequence, crowd management is a sprawling R&D area (see related work) that includes theoretical models, simulation tools, as well as various support systems. There has also been significant interest in using computer vision techniques to monitor crowds. However, overall, the topic of crowd management has been given only little attention within the smart city domain. In this paper we report on a platform for smart, city-wide crowd management based on a participatory mobile phone sensing platform. Originally, the apps based on this platform have been conceived as a technology validation tool for crowd based sensing within a basic research project. However, the initial deployments at the Notte Bianca Festival¹ in Malta and at the Lord Mayor’s Show in London² generated so much interest within the civil protection community that it has gradually evolved into a full-blown participatory crowd management system and is now in the process of being commercialized through a startup company. Until today it has been deployed at 14 events in three European countries (UK, Netherlands, Switzerland) and used by well over 100,000 people….

Obtaining knowledge about the current size and density of a crowd is one of the central aspects of crowd monitoring . For the last decades, automatic crowd monitoring in urban areas has mainly been performed by means of image processing . One use case for such video-based applications can be found in, where a CCTV camera-based system is presented that automatically alerts the staff of subway stations when the waiting platform is congested. However, one of the downsides of video-based crowd monitoring is the fact that video cameras tend to be considered as privacy invading. Therefore, presents a privacy preserving approach to video-based crowd monitoring where crowd sizes are estimated without people models or object tracking.

With respect to the mitigation of catastrophes induced by panicking crowds (e.g. during an evacuation), city planners and architects increasingly rely on tools simulating crowd behaviors in order to optimize infrastructures. Murakami et al. presents an agent based simulation for evacuation scenarios. Shendarkar et al. presents a work that is also based on BSI (believe, desire, intent) agents – those agents however are trained in a virtual reality environment thereby giving greater flexibility to the modeling. Kluepfel et al. on the other hand uses a cellular automaton model for the simulation of crowd movement and egress behavior.

With smartphones becoming everyday items, the concept of crowd sourcing information from users of mobile application has significantly gained traction. Roitman et al. presents a smart city system where the crowd can send eye witness reports thereby creating deeper insights for city officials. Szabo et al. takes this approach one step further and employs the sensors built into smartphones for gathering data for city services such as live transit information. Ghose et al. utilizes the same principle for gathering information on road conditions. Pan et al. uses a combination of crowd sourcing and social media analysis for identifying traffic anomalies….(More)”.

Towards a critique of cybernetic urbanism: The smart city and the society of control

Curated on May 17, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Maroš Krivý at Planning Theory: “The smart city has become a hegemonic notion of urban governance, transforming and supplanting planning. The first part of this article reviews current critiques of this notion. Scholars present three main arguments against the smart city: that it is incompatible with an informal character of the city, that it subjects the city to corporate power and that it reproduces social and urban inequalities. It is argued that these critiques either misunderstand how power functions in the smart city or fail to address it as a specific modality of entrepreneurial urban governance. The second part advances an alternative critique, contending that the smart city should be understood as an urban embodiment of the society of control (Deleuze). The smart city is embedded in the intellectual framework of second order cybernetics and articulates urban subjectivity in terms of data flows. Planning as a political practice is superseded by an environmental-behavioural control, in which subjectivity is articulated supra-individually (permeating the city with sensing nodes) and infra-individually (making citizens into sensing nodes)….(More)”

Jakarta’s plans for predictive government

Curated on May 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Medha Basu at GovInsider: “Jakarta is predicting floods and traffic using complaints data, and plans to do so for dengue as well.

Its Smart City Unit has partnered with startup Qlue to build a dashboard, analysing data from online complaints, sensors and traffic apps. “Our algorithms can predict several things related to our reports such as flood, traffic, and others”, Qlue co-founder and CEO Rama Raditya told GovInsider.

Take floods, for instance. Using trends in complaints from citizens, water level history from sensors and weather data, it can predict the intensity of floods in specific locations next year. “They can predict what will happen when they compare the weather with the flood conditions from last year”, he said.

The city will start to predict dengue hotspots from next year, Rama said. The dashboard was not originally looking at dengue, but after receiving “thousands of complaints on dengue locations”, the government is now looking into this data. “Next year our algorithm will allow the government to know before it happens so they can prepare the amount of medication and so on within each district,” he said.

The dashboard is paired with an app. The app started with collecting citizens’ complaints and has been expanding with new features. It now has a virtual reality section to explore tourist sites in the city. Next week it is launching an augmented reality feature giving directions to nearby ATMs, restaurants,mosques and parks, Rama said.

Qlue has become a strategic part of the Jakarta administration, with the Governor himself using it to decide who to fire and promote. Following its rise in the capital city, it is now being used by 12 other cities across Indonesia: Bandung, Makassar, Bali, Manado, Surabaya, Bogor, Depok, Palembang, Bekasi,Yogyakarta, Riau and Semarang….(More)

Smart City and Smart Government: Synonymous or Complementary?

Curated on April 19, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Leonidas G. Anthopoulos and Christopher G. Reddick: “Smart City is an emerging and multidisciplinary domain. It has been recently defined as innovation, not necessarily but mainly through information and communications technologies (ICT), which enhance urban life in terms of people, living, economy, mobility and governance. Smart government is also an emerging topic, which attracts increasing attention from scholars who work in public administration, political and information sciences. There is no widely accepted definition for smart government, but it appears to be the next step of e-government with the use of technology and innovation by governments for better performance. However, it is not clear whether these two terms co-exist or concern different domains. The aim of this paper is to investigate the term smart government and to clarify its meaning in relationship to the smart city. In this respect this paper performed a comprehensive literature review analysis and concluded that smart government is shown not to be synonymous with smart city. Our findings show that smart city has a dimension of smart government, and smart government uses smart city as an area of practice. The authors conclude that smart city is complimentary, part of larger smart government movement….(More)”

How do they fare? Govt complaints apps compared

Curated on March 25, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Medha Basu at GovInsider Asia: “Countries across the region have launched complaints apps. But how do they fare? GovInsider takes a look at each how they compare.

#BetterPenang

#BetterPenang was one of the earliest complaints apps in the region, however. It was released in 2013, built by citizens with their own funding, and was later adopted by local authorities to respond to complaints. Officials answer to citizens directly on the app, in some cases responding with photos of how the problem was addressed.

The Mayor of Seberang Perai city in Penang monitors the complaints herself. She has appointed a team to ensure that complaints are responded to.

Downloads: 5,000
Rating: 4.3 out of 5

Interview: Mayor of Seberang Perai

Qlue

Qlue-screenshots

#BetterPenang compares with Jakarta’s similar Qlue app, which was built by a startup and is now being used by the city government.

Qlue has gone a step further with features to keep citizens engaged with the government. It ranks local authorities in Jakarta based on how quickly they respond to reports.

It has a gamified element that awards citizens points for posting complaints and inviting others to use the app. The points can be traded for avatars with “special powers”.

Downloads: 100,000
Rating: 4.2 out of 5

Interview: Inside Jakarta’s Smart City HQ

Cakna

Inspired by #BetterPenang, the Malaysian federal government has launched its own complaints app, which it plans to push to every city in the country.

The features are similar to Penang’s app, but Cakna has broader coverage thanks to federal government backing. Reports are automatically sent to the relevant local authority in the country.

That also makes the app more comprehensive from the government’s perspective. The federal government can now monitor the quality of services across cities on an internal dashboard, while cities can see all of the complaints in their area.

Downloads: 1,000
Rating: 4.2 out of 5

Interview: How we built… Malaysia’s complaints app

OneService

OneService

Singapore’s OneService complaints app asks users to submit additional information, as compared to the other apps. It lets pick the date and time when problem was seen. This could help officials better track and resolve cases.

The government has created a separate unit – the Municipal Services Officer – to get these complaints addressed, particularly in areas that require coordination across agencies. The unit is already linked with at least 10 agencies, and is working to expanding this network to other agencies and town councils….(More)”

Cities, Data, and Digital Innovation

Curated on March 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Kleinman: “Developments in digital innovation and the availability of large-scale data sets create opportunities for new economic activities and new ways of delivering city services while raising concerns about privacy. This paper defines the terms Big Data, Open Data, Open Government, and Smart Cities and uses two case studies – London (U.K.) and Toronto – to examine questions about using data to drive economic growth, improve the accountability of government to citizens, and offer more digitally enabled services. The paper notes that London has been one of a handful of cities at the forefront of the Open Data movement and has been successful in developing its high-tech sector, although it has so far been less innovative in the use of “smart city” technology to improve services and lower costs. Toronto has also made efforts to harness data, although it is behind London in promoting Open Data. Moreover, although Toronto has many assets that could contribute to innovation and economic growth, including a growing high-technology sector, world-class universities and research base, and its role as a leading financial centre, it lacks a clear narrative about how these assets could be used to promote the city. The paper draws some general conclusions about the links between data innovation and economic growth, and between open data and open government, as well as ways to use big data and technological innovation to ensure greater efficiency in the provision of city services…(More)“

Smart Cities Readiness Guide

Curated on March 14, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

SmartCitiesCouncil: “Welcome to the Readiness Guide. This document was assembled with input from many of the world’s leading smart city practitioners – the members and advisors of the Smart Cities Council. It will help you create a vision for the future of your own city. Equally important, it will help you build an action plan to get to that better future.

The first goal of the Readiness Guide is to give you a “vision” of a smart city, to help you understand how technology will transform the cities of tomorrow.

The second goal is to help you construct your own roadmap to that future. It suggests the goals to which you should aspire, the features and functions you should specify, the best practices that will gain you the maximum benefits for the minimum cost, at reduced risk.

The Readiness Guide is intended for mayors, city managers, city planners and their staffs. It helps cities help themselves by providing objective, vendor-neutral information to make confident, educated choices about the technologies that can transform a city.

Cities around the world are already making tremendous progress in achieving economic, environmental and social sustainability, in export-based initiatives and in the creation of 21st century jobs. All of these are excellent ways to improve city living standards and economies. The concept of smart cities doesn’t compete with these efforts. Instead, smart city technologies can support and enhance work already underway….Contents:

Crowdsourcing On-street Parking Space Detection

Curated on March 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruizhi Liao et al in: “As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers’ time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS receiver and associated Arduino micro-controllers. It is mounted on the passenger side of a car to measure the distance from the vehicle to the nearest roadside obstacle. Multiple road tests are conducted around Wheatley, Oxford to gather results and emulate the crowdsourcing approach. By extracting parked vehicles’ features from the collected trace, a supervised learning algorithm is developed to estimate roadside parking occupancy and spot illegal parking vehicles. A quantity estimation model is derived to calculate the required number of sensing units to cover urban streets. The estimation is quantitatively compared to a fixed sensing solution. The results show that the crowdsourcing way would need substantially fewer sensors compared to the fixed sensing system…(More)”