EUROCITIES’ Knowledge Society Forum brings together over 100 European cities and business partners to develop an inclusive information society. The Forum offers a cooperation platform to exchange on best ICT practices and showcases of cities across Europe; its activities are supported by four working groups – on the themes of eInclusion, Open Data, Smart Cities and the EU Services Directive.

Registration is open until 13 March 2012 – When completing your registration please indicate which part of the event you would like to join.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2767284021

FIA-Aalborg will be co-hosted with a number of European Future Internet events.

Full details and registration on the website.

In this workshop, organised by Fireball & Eurocities & FIRE, invited speakers from Eurocities, FIRE, the Smart City Portfolio CIP projects and ENoLL will present views and results to open up the discussion on shaping the future “Smart Cities” agenda, starting from the needs of the cities, their citizens and partner organisations. In addition, the workshop will create new linkages and enhance cooperation between different constituencies interested in Smart City development in order to operationlise policies for future problem solving and strategic actions.

The event is organised as a cooperation between FIREBALL, Eurocities and FIRE, together with different projects in the area of Smart Cities including Living Labs.

Full details of how you can register are here on the website.

In the city of Ghent, IBBT, Alcatel-Lucent and the city council want to develop a ‘smart engagement’ application. In order to generate ideas for these ‘smart (city) engagement’ apps we initiated a crowdsourcing initiative. Crowdsourcing websites can be conceptualized as Web 2.0 platforms, enabling internet users to get involved and create content. Crowdsourcing-processes involve three different stakeholders: the individuals forming ‘the crowd’, the companies or organizations looking to benefit from the crowd input, and an intermediation platform, the so-called ‘crowdsourcing enabler’.

Figure 1: screenshot of the crowdsourcing platform ‘Mijndigitaalideevoorgent’

 Our crowdsourcing platform was launched in the beginning of April 2011. The platform was based on proprietary software of UserVoice, a firm providing hosted feedback forums, which allow customers to create, discuss, and vote for ideas. The crowdsourcing platform, called www.mijndigitaalideevoorgent.be (‘mydigitalideaforghent’), encompassed an online forum structured around users providing actionable ideas and users ‘voting up’ the best ideas to the top (with an extra constraint of having a limited number of votes to spend, thus focusing people on what is really important to them). We asked the visitors of our crowdsourcing platform to answer the question: ‘How can ICT make it even more pleasant to live in Ghent?’. Our goal was to create a list with a broad range of applications, including ‘wild ideas’, for smart city engagement.

Although, the website’s launch got rather little press coverage, our crowdsourcing website got ‘picked up’ in the conversations on Web 2.0 platforms and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We also disseminated the URL to the crowdsourcing platform via an electronic newsletter to the university students in the city. The crowdsourcing platform was open to answers between April 1st and May 15th. In this period the website was visited by almost 5,500 unique visitors and counted almost 18,000 page views. The city blog ‘GentBlogt.be’, Facebook, Twitter and the city of Ghent’s website were amongst the top referrers to the crowdsourcing platform. More than 1400 people registered their e-mailadress on ‘Mijndigitaalideevoorgent’, enabling them to submit an idea or cast votes on already submitted ideas.

A total of 128 ideas were submitted, which received more than 4800 votes, mainly in the first week after launch. Idea submitters could choose a pre-defined category for their ideas or could leave their idea uncategorized. Especially the categories ‘E-government’, ‘Mobility’ and ‘Other’ catch the eye as they all received more than 20 ideas. On the other hand, categories such as ‘Houses’, ‘Security’ and ‘Sport’ only received a couple of ideas. This shows that the goal of our crowdsourcing initiative was understood and that ‘Mijndigitaalideevoorgent’ achieved its targeted outcome: people contributing ideas on the relation between citizens and the city (e-government), and on citizens and mobility in the city (mobility).

Especially the ideas ‘Multifunctional application or website’, ‘Digital information kiosks placed in the city’ and ‘ASUM: Automatic System for Unified Mobility’ proved to be very popular, not only in the amount of votes they received but also in the comments that were submitted on these ideas. We will discuss the top-3 ideas briefly.

• ‘Multifunctional application or website’ is a very broad idea that was further described by the submitter as: “An online application, through kiosks or smartphones, that enables you to consult in real time the bus schedules, the upcoming events in the city and all the relevant facts associated with these points-of-interest. In this app you can also find culture, leisure, tourist spots, sports accommodation etc.”. Most comments on this idea targeted the content that such a generic app should provide, or mentioned the ‘digital divide’ and the fact that not all Ghent citizens have a smartphone or internet access.

• The idea ‘Digital information kiosks placed in the city’, which received 662 votes, was described as “A means to provide information on a variety of topics such as public toilets, parking spaces, museums, … But also an input channel for the online reporting of offenses or city issues, including broken street lighting, vandalism and such”. Most comments on this idea addressed the fact that Ghent already has digital information kiosks placed in the streets and on the squares of the city, that afford citizens to consult information or report certain issues to the city council. Quite some comments suggested that the user interface of these kiosks should be merely updated.

• The idea that was ranked third through collaborative filtering was ‘ASUM: Automatic System for Unified Mobility’, described as “Would it not be wonderful to have a multi-platform application, where you simply say ‘I want to go from here to there’, and the app than calculates, based on real-time information (such as traffic jams, weather conditions, schedules of public transport, …) how to most optimally (fast, dry, quiet, …) reach your destination. The availability can also come in the unified mobility system. Credo: One problem, One app …”.  In contrast to the two previous ideas, this idea only got one comment that suggested to implement Google Transit in Ghent instead. Google Transit a service that enables people to plan a trip using public transportation.

Although our crowdsourcing initiative is only the first phase of a larger process of opportunity identification, the results seem to offer a lot of interesting and valuable knowledge and useful (and sometimes surprising) answers. In addition citizens engaged in conversation and discussions about the usefulness, fairness and relevance of some ideas and about their cost benefits ratio, in extensive forum threats. Our results reveal that participants especially emphasize generic tools or platforms: one-stop service points where they can find all the information they need on any subject. These one-stop service points should provide personalized information and should also offer affordances to start a dialogue and direct interaction with the city council or with other citizens.

The cities involved in the SMARTiP project will be in attendance at this year’s KSF, and partaking in the Smart Cities working group on Thursday 20th October. The conference runs across the two days, and links in to Dutch Design week on the weekend.

Full details of how you can register are here on the website.

In parallel, we’ve taken delivery of our first “wearable” sensor.Smaller than a smart phone, the City SensPod, developed by Sensaris a French based technology company, has several sensors built in and uses the phone network to send environmental data to the internet.Measuring Co2, temperature and humidity, the SensPod will give us a portable option as we look to develop the projects around the development of the sensor network – and gives us flexibility beyond our fixed location sensors.

Our only concern is that the instructions say to keep out moisture away from the sensors. Lovely as the weather has been this early Autumn, in Manchester, such a dry season rarely lasts for long. So if anyone can come up with a SensPod umbrella, we’ll be more than grateful!

At the Picnic Festival last week in Amsterdam I attended a session by Benoit Jacob, BMW’s head of design. He asked the audience to stand up – it was in the Grand Theatre of the festival and the room was full – then asked everyone to sit down if they owned a car. Perhaps over half did so. Then he asked everyone else to sit down who didn’t own a car, but needed to use a car, and almost everyone else did. I was amazed that I was one of less than a dozen people standing. The session wasn’t talking about the car of the past though, but the car of the future, and how designing a car for the urban environment required different design features than in the future – whether its in its environmental footprint, its capacity, or how it is powered.

More of this is in a fascinating article on the Guardian website by Alex Raynor headlined “The End of Motoring.” The numbers of young people taking their driving test in the UK is in decline, and rather than just a result of the harsh economic environment, Raynor’s piece suggests that its also signalling an end to our “love affair” with the car as status symbol in an age of iPads and other consumer status symbols. Perhaps more surprisingly, the piece talks about how the amount of journeys we undertake, has stayed the same, and even gone done over the years. There are quite a few questions in the article – where the research just isn’t available – but for mature western cities, perhaps we have reached both the symbolic and actual height of car ownership; if not car use. The article highlights a number of interesting initiatives – such as dealing with parking problems by those with spare driveways allowing others to park their cars; as well as car schemes that are flexible depending on your needs – a run around for the city, a van for when you are moving house.

In the context of the smart city, and “smart mobility” – the SMARTiP pilot is taking place in the city of Bologna, in Italy – understanding our changing relationship with the car; the relationship between this and new and old methods of public transport (e.g. driverless cars); as well as how we ensure that we have the transport capacity that sustainable growth requires, seem areas that we are only just beginning to explore.

The piece ends with the following quote from David Metz, visiting professor in UCL’s Centre for Transport Studies,  -: “There’s this idea of a green metropolis, where land values are high so there’s less space to heat, and where electric vehicles are viable, because the trips taken are shorter. If we’re living in a world that is urbanising globally, this is worth considering.”

Article: The End of Motoring by Alex Rayner