By Claire Thorne

Wednesday 1 May 2013 #rcaktn

Hosted by Innovation RCA, the Technology Strategy Board’s Knowledge Transfer Networks, and Open City Labs. 

What is citizen-centred design? And what does it mean in the context of future transport? What could, and should, future transport modes, networks and offerings look like? And how do we get ‘there’?

Whatever insights the day’s discussions promised, I turned up to the Dyson building, Battersea, sure of at least one success: The Royal College of Art had managed to bring a hugely diverse group of people [delegate list, pdf ] together under one (very stylised) roof.

The aim of the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) workshop was to scope out one/more potential ‘citizen-centred design for future transport’ multi-institute research programme(s) to take forward.

Here’s my summary of the day’s discussions and key themes:

In a lecture theatre that resembles no other natural sciences, engineering or business school lecture theatre I’ve ever seen* the facilitator (with seemingly endless enthusiasm!) brought together representatives of Open City Labs, local authorities, the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities, the Technology Strategy Board, Transport for London, the Greater London Authority, and organisations like Useful Simple … and of course Digital City Exchange (Imperial College London’s smart cities research programme).

* There are a host of reasons, but for a start, it had windows. And lots of them.

There wasn’t just variety to be found in the participant’s disciplines and sectors; all age groups were represented – refreshing indeed…

[Multi/cross/intra-disciplinary, multi/cross/intra-functional, multi/cross/intra-sectoral, multi/cross/intra-institute, multi/cross/intra-… we hear it everywhere in HEIs (and there’s no denying its value) but it never seems to go far enough. Where’s the equivalent promotion of multi/cross/intra-generational research and academia-industry collaboration?]

Nevertheless, I noted that we seemed a tad short on ‘techies’ (engineers, developers etc) whilst Beatrice Rogers (Creative Industries KTN) was wondering where the policymakers were… Perhaps they were there, or perhaps they got waylaid by other, more outdoors-y activities…

That special combination of a creative space coupled with creative minds led to, well, creative thinking and lively (but friendly) discussions… all manifested through the power of the humble post-it note, taking over every wall.

[By the way, is there an app that can take a photo of multiple post-it notes, and generate a word (or other) document with all the content? (with the text appropriately coloured, and sized proportional to its importance). Anyone? That could be handy/slightly terrifying…]

Duncan Wilson’s  (Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities)  keynote [full slides, via slideshare] highlighted his ‘top 10’ thematic issues/opportunities for citizen-centred design for future transport:

1. Interfaces e.g. wireless electric vehicle charging mechanisms

2. Systems approach

3. Transactions

4. Peer-to-peer

5. Business Models

6. Nudging (i.e. often incentivised, behavioural change) e.g. Chromorama (gamification of London journeys, using Oyster card data)

7. Connected

8. Integrated

9. Feedback

10. Personal space

(and note they’re not sector-specific, and hence pretty much apply to any ‘smart cities’ initiative). Check out the city issue map – presented at the World Economic Forum approximately five years ago. Now in 2013, how has this landscape of issues changed?

During our very first task there was a struggle to get past the wording of the workshop’s title: Should we be talking about Citizen-centred design? People-centred design? User-centred design? Or other?

I wondered what role future transport could play in, not just moving people between sites, from A to B, but in building communities along the way. Jump on a bus in, say, Aberdeen, and if you don’t see someone you know, soon enough you’ll have sparked up conversation with someone you’ve not met before. (Of course this is in stark contrast to London, and undoubtedly some prefer it this way). Could the journey on the city bus become our modern-day ‘village hall’, or ‘community centre’?

Aside from the access to existing data-streams, I think Digital City Exchange would be keen to explore

• the role of big/open data (and particularly real-time predictive modeling)
• incentivising users’ behavioural change

in citizen-centred design of future transport solutions.

A great day, a tonne of data (thanks Rakesh Gaur, Head of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability at TfL!!) and… some transport trivia:

• A London black cab costs £38,000.
• In 1900, 90% of travel was on public transport (e.g. street cars).
• There are 300,000 users of mobility scooters in the UK.
• The majority of transport use in London is for journeys of ~3-5 miles.
• What’s the most common reason why older people don’t use public transport? (it’s not about fare prices, fear of unsociable behaviour, or waiting for connections in the cold weather)… Guaranteed proximity to public toilet facilities!
• The reason why General Motor’s genius (or dubious?) business model was really a success(!)

Thursday 7 February 2013, Queen’s Tower Rooms, Imperial College London

DCE co-host ‘teacamp’ event on Open Data and Smart Cities

On February 7th, Imperial’s Digital City Exchange, the Digital Economy Lab and Sustainable Society Network+ hosted a special, one-off teacamp.

So, what is ‘teacamp‘?

Teacamp is an established series of informal, free, discussion events hosted via the Government Digital Service (GDS, Cabinet Office).

“Teacamps are informal gatherings for digital people who work in and around government and also outside of government. They are usually two hours long including a slot for a speaker and chatting over a cup of tea, hence the name ‘teacamp’…”

What made this teacamp special?

The February teacamp, hosted at Imperial’s South Kensington campus, was planned to coincide with the launch of the Urban Prototyping London 2013 festival, and to focus the discussions on to big and open data.

Speakers

Around seventy people from a range of disciplines and professions came along to interact with the panellists during this one-off event, organised by teacamp founder (Jane O’Loughlin, @teacampLondon) and DCE’s Dr Cathy Mulligan (@API_Economics, DCE Research Fellow) and Claire Thorne (@clairethorne, DCE Programme Coordinator).

(After some last minute tweaks!!) The panel consisted of:

• Richard Foulsham (@DELaboratory) – Programme Coordinator – IOP and Digital, Digital Economy Lab, Imperial College London
• Dr Jenny O’Connor (@Jenny0C) – DCE Research Associate exploring citizen engagement, technology development and adoption, data ownership, and the human aspects of privacy and security in relation to various categories of use.
• Dr Koen van Dam (@Koen_van_dam) -  DCE Research Associate, developing an agent-based model of city systems based on spatial and temporal data from multiple sectors.
• Dr David Boyle – DCE Research Fellow investigating city data-streams and the sensing landscape.
• James Smith (@floppy) – A developer at the UK Open Data Institute and lead organiser for @cleanwebuk

The discussions

For an overview of the discussions, check out Ross Atkin’s comic-style sketch notes (@rossatkin) and @Puffles2010‘s blog post, capturing all the action!

If you’d like more info on upcoming teacamps, keep an eye on the teacamp site/Twitter feed…

Istanbul,13-14 September 2012

By Pantelis Koutroumpis

The first of its kind World Intelligent Cities Summit took place in Istanbul on the 13-14 September. The agenda included prominent figures from the Turkish government and local authorities together with international experts presenting best practices for the development of connected and sustainable cities. While primarily a business and policy summit it was a rather interesting meeting in terms of the common direction towards a more sustainable future where ICT plays a critical role.

Idris Gulluce, Deputy & Chair Committee on Public Works, Reconstruction, Transportation and Tourism of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) talked extensively about the importance of local culture and social understanding for the success of smart policies in cities. He underlined the increasing impact of behavioral sciences in designing, implementing and benchmarking policies and took some distance from ‘all-purpose’ EU guidelines and regulations that often oversee social cohesion and wellbeing in favor of preset targets. Gulluce outlined the list of major transport projects planned or underway in Istanbul like the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Istanbul Strait, the Istanbul Strait Road Channel Crossing, the Gebze-Orhangazi-Izmir Highway and the North Marmara Highway including the third Bosphorous Bridge in the city. In response to the decision to go on with these projects, Gulluce was criticized by the press in the room for a lack of planning and communication in the design and launch phases. From the lively discussions it became evident that Istanbul has changed dramatically during the last fifteen years. As he noted, Hurriyet – a newspaper with national circulation – offered coupons for gas masks back in 1994 to address the problem of air quality in the city. Today the most significant problems come from excessive traffic primarily due to the size of the city (~13m residents) and a historic lack of urban building plans. Besides the economic performance of the area continues to lure more young people to the city from the other regions of the country further affecting the local traffic.

Egemen Bagis, Minister of EU Affairs, went on to explain the increasing impact of cities’ social capital in the development of sustainable-living strategies. Transport, energy, water management, manufacturing and financial services all need to change their practices to address the evolving techno-economic ecosystem. He also highlighted the major improvements in Istanbul describing his experiences when access to drinking water was a major issue for the citizens and ‘hair dressers used soda water to work with’. Moving beyond the darker past he mentioned that people are now already beyond the hostilities of the past and that ‘asking for more tulips’ to decorate green areas is evidence for this improvement. In terms of actions by the government Bagis said that 16m tablets have been distributed to students and identified this policy as a critical broadband demand stimulation measure. The gradual shift from military expenditures towards education is another clear sign of the set of policies that Bagis continues to support.

Pierro Fassino, Mayor of Torino, discussed the transformation of a former industrial city into a modern sustainable landscape. His policies include a successful cycle hire scheme and a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2020, in line with the 20-20-20 EU agenda. As explained policy-makers have to find the right mix of tools to ‘marry’ digital applications with social cohesion. Direct communications to the officials through social media or simple apps are a global trend that redefines active participation and democratic representation. His policies include a system of systems approach in managing the city linking all information feeds from energy, water, transport, telecommunications and manufacturing to a central location. Fassino described himself as a proponent of the digitization of public data as the only way to efficiently manage modern metropolises.

Hakki Tok, Chief Information Officer of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, pointed to the progress of the city in the digitization domain and announced that a domain name TSD extension has been granted to Istanbul; from 2013 local servers will have the option to be host under the .ist extension, slightly departing from the country’s .tr TSD. Along with mayors and municipal authorities he showed iPhone and Android apps already in operation that notify the IT centers of local municipalities for urgent or everyday citizens’ needs.

Other presentations included pilots for real life Living labs in cities (Hungary, Switzerland and Turkey), water and wastewater applications as financially viable solutions with significant reuse of resources, smart grid applications and local generation of electricity, applications for buildings and retrofits for households to meet the new model of ‘Plus Homes’ by the Fraunhofer Institute and many more.

In a nutshell, this summit showed that Istanbul is turning into a city-model for Turkey and the world both in terms of its size and the digital applications coupled with policy initiatives already in progress. It is also a great place with nice views to Bosphorous early in the morning and exquisite dietary combinations in Taksim Square a little bit later.

1st City Protocol Workshop: Building together better cities
16-17 July 2012, Barcelona, Spain

By Orestis Tsinalis

The 1st City Protocol workshop was an event co-organised by the Barcelona City Council, Cisco, and GDF SUEZ with participants from 22 companies, 33 cities, 19 organisations, and 17 universities. Imperial College London was represented in the workshop by a team of researchers from the Digital City Exchange programme.

The City Protocol is a new initiative that aims to bring together stakeholders from the industry, city councils, non-governmental organisations, and the academia with the goal to create a common global-scale framework for collaboration and innovation in cities.

Going to the workshop with no prior knowledge of what the City Protocol is (as with most participants), I didn’t know what to expect. The analogy to the Internet Protocol, which was implied by Vint Cerf (one of the creators of the TCP protocol) being one of the speakers, served part as a way to picture what the workshop would be about, and part as a confusing metaphor from the techie world. But let’s get started.

The City Protocol vision

On the first day, the welcome talk was given by Manel Sanromà, CIO of the City of Barcelona. His talk was a call for collaboration in order to create the cities of the future, which can be summarised in his phrase: “It’s about what we build together, alone we fail”.

The next speech by Vint Cerf was delivered through video as he couldn’t be there. The three main suggestions that he made, regarding what an initiative like the City Protocol should do in order to succeed, were:

1. Create a pool of the kinds of applications that could be built on top of the City Protocol
2. Rapid-prototype pilot projects to test ideas, and keep in mind that the ultimate goal should be to facilitate creating and finding the best ideas
3. Always document the process

Vicente Guallart, Chief Architect of the City of Barcelona, presented the vision of the City Protocol. He stressed the importance of having a vision of what will happen in 50 years and preparing for it by taking decisions. He also highlighted that “the Internet has changed our lives but not our cities, yet” , therefore we need novel strategies to add value in our cities through technology. Guallart summarised two basic directions towards that goal:

1. From product- and site-oriented cities to service-oriented cities
2. From centralised to distributed management of resources, from one-to-many to many-to-many

He concluded his talk by suggesting that “cities need a common language”, and that the City Protocol could be this language.

Carlos Moreno, Scientific Advisor of the President & CEO with GDF SUEZ, presented cities as complex systems and proposed a methodological framework for understanding them as such in order to effectively intervene.

Anil Menon, President of Cisco’s Globalisation Smart+Connected Communities, underlined that “ICT is like water and electricity” for our cities, and we should not think about ICT after we build our buildings and infrastructures. He presented five elements that are needed in order to realise our vision of the sustainable cities of the future:

1. Visionary leadership, not utopian thinking
2. Global standards: We need to become globally-aware
3. Smart regulation: The current regulation is not suitable for digital cities
4. Intelligent public-private partnerships, not of the “avoid cost-avoid risk” kind
5. Common language: We need to bring disparate ecosystems together, collaborate and support open innovation to achieve a common purpose

Why a City Protocol?

The first group session of the workshop was titled ‘Why a City Protocol?’. Counter-intuitive as it may seem the participants of the four groups were asked to define why cities need a City Protocol when nobody (or at least very few) knew what a City Protocol is. This was a reasonable question that many of us had, so Manel Sanromà gave us his idea of what the City Protocol is: “An open community that produces agreement in rough consensus mode”.

There were two sub-questions that we had to answer during the session, what the benefits of and the impediments towards the realisation of the City Protocol would be. On the one hand, the potential benefits of the City Protocol that the teams identified were:

• Service-orientedness
• Accelerated innovation
• New business opportunities
• Consolidation of standards
• Facilitation of knowledge sharing
• Collective action
• Emergence of a multi-actor view in cities

On the other hand, the impediments could be:

• A lack of vision (short-term vs. long-term)
• Problems of scoping the project (high-level vs. specific)
• Financing
• Resistance to change by various stakeholders
• A lack of transparency
• A lack of concrete deliverables
• The need for customisation for different cities (global vs. local)
• The governance model of the City Protocol itself

What should a City Protocol produce?

The second part of the first day started with a talk by Vicente Guallart who suggested the directions along which the City Protocol should move to define its deliverables. He said that the City Protocol “should produce agreements”. According to Guallart, these City Protocol Agreements (CPAs) should revolve around three areas:

1. Standards and recommendations
2. Projects and policies
3. Indicators and certification

“We are moving from a world of regulations to a world of indicators”, Guallart remarked.

Naturally, the aim of the second group session that followed was to identify more specifically the ‘what’ of the City Protocol. The groups identified the following deliverables, which I’m quoting here in the original wording:

• A citizen-centred approach
• A key performance indicators (KPI) framework
• Business models for open data
• A model of cooperation among the stakeholders
• Technology guidelines
• A tangible programme
• Integrated planning
• Prioritisation of issues
• Customisation for local requirements
• A portfolio of use cases in order to convince citizens
• Experimentation (pilots, small projects)
• A governance model that addresses ownership, accountability, and control issues
• Standards

As it becomes obvious from the above, the discussion revolved around thinking about the effects of or managing and controlling what the City Protocol will produce, which is not there yet, and addressed the ‘what’ question only tangentially. In my opinion, the ‘what’ in a project as the City Protocol should be about very well-defined and tangible deliverables, which, apart from some notable exceptions, didn’t came up. I will address this issue in the final section of this post, because it is important to relate my remarks with the ‘how’ of the City Protocol, which is the subject of the next section.

How should a City Protocol be developed and how should it evolve?

On the second day, Manel Sanromà, presented his vision of the City Protocol Society, the body that will produce and loosely manage the City Protocol. The idea for the City Protocol Society is inspired from the way the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society operate.

The IETF is the main body that determines the standards that allow the Internet to function, which is an open community with no formal membership, and operates through self-appointed deliverable-oriented and limited time-scoped working groups. The working groups produce draft documents called requests for comments (RFCs), and the RFCs that are approved by the community after discussion and modifications eventually become standards. The operating principle of IETF is “rough consensus and running code”.

The Internet Society is the formal organisation that manages the IETF. It has formal membership, is led by a Board of Trustees, owns the output of the IETF, and has 90 local chapters around the world.

Sanromà proposed a similar structure for the City Protocol. Effectively, according to Sanromà’s vision, the City Protocol will be the ‘task force’ that is responsible for the development of the protocol using an open, collaborative, rough consensus-based approach, and producing written documents (CPAs, similar to RFCs). In this scheme, the City Protocol Society will be responsible for the governance of the City Protocol ‘task force’, with formal membership, and will supervise and own the City Protocol. The society will be led by a board elected by the constituencies. The first CPA, CPA0, which was presented at the workshop and was signed by the participants, can be found on City Protocol’s wiki.

The task of the group session that followed this talk was to identify the ‘how’ of the City Protocol, although, in my view, the discussion should have preceded the talk, because, in a way, almost everyone felt like we would discuss about something that had been already fixed. The ‘how’s’ that the groups proposed were (again I’m using the original wording):

• Guarantee the commitment of the City Protocol participants, politicians, policy makers, community and citizens
• Create a knowledge base of existing projects
• Create a masterplan/roadmap with clear goals
• Write an elevator pitch for the City Protocol
• Concentrate on some quick wins
• Set up formal and flexible governance for the City Protocol
• Create a collaborative virtual space for the community
• Identify specific subjects
• Define the scope of the City Protocol
• Balance the interests of cities and companies
• Establish city labs to test ideas
• Find out how the City Protocol can be ‘sold’ to interested parties
• Identify the leaders

A document that summarises the outcomes of the workshop can be found here.

Closing remarks

I personally strongly believe in open and collaborative initiatives like the City Protocol, and my participation in the workshop was very rewarding from many perspectives. This is why I decided to sign the first agreement, CPA0, as a member of Digital City Exchange. There is a significant potential in such efforts and I certainly view positively the City Protocol project. There are, however, certain important issues that I would like to address at this point, with the sole aim of constructive criticism, and I hope they will be viewed with this in mind by the City Protocol community.

In my opinion, politically, the City Protocol and City Protocol Society pair makes perfect sense. However, I can already see an a priori dichotomy between development and governance that is not at all evident in the case of the Internet organisations. More precisely, in the case of the Internet, the people who develop the Internet (the IETF) and the people who manage the outcomes (the Internet Society) are not different (not by definition at least). In any open technological space leaders emerge through their contributions, and managers are often the most active contributors of working code too (see Linux as a good example of what I’m talking about). In short, there is a tight coupling of innovation and its management in terms of the people who participate in these areas.

On the contrary, from what I experienced at the workshop, many participants would want to appoint leaders before anything tangible is produced, and create a quite artificial border line between development and governance. This rationale tries to replicate old institutional forms in an open and collaborative setting, an act which, in my opinion, will make the project dysfunctional, and cause it to move slowly. And, especially at the very start, we need fast decisive steps by building things. Leadership will then naturally emerge. I don’t