Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

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 see why and with what criteria leaders can be appointed before anything is built.

I also have to admit that I was quite frustrated by the fact that some participants perceived the ‘why’ of the project as something that can be used for ‘selling’ the City Protocol from day one. Again, I don’t understand how we can sell something that is not made yet, and I feel that this urge by some participants to take up the ‘sales’ roles before the project begins emphasises the aforementioned dichotomy between development and governance, and, ultimately, puts the openness of the project into risk.

On a more technical point, as with any kind of smart cities-related project, data is a competitive advantage through which innovation distribution is controlled. I believe that for a project as the City Protocol, which is based upon the premise of openness and collaboration, it would be useful to see who of the participants are committed to open up their data, to whom, and under what conditions. If there can be no viable agreements and solutions to the lack of openness in the data domain, it will be very difficult to proceed in the project.

A related issue is that I got the impression that the majority of the participants in the workshop view technology as secondary in the City Protocol effort. For them, technology is the ‘tool’ that will realise whatever is decided at the governance level. In my opinion, the City Protocol has a very significant technical component, which is precisely the ‘running code’ of the project. Therefore, the City Protocol community should understand the importance of technology in the project, and define more precisely what the running code is.

I believe that the Internet analogy is a very apt one for the City Protocol, and by addressing and resolving the development-governance dichotomy, the lack of data openness, and the lack of well-defined running code, the City Protocol could be a project that will shape the future of our cities.

Ovum-DCE Smart Cities Europe 2012

The Lancaster, London 19-20 June 2012

You can find the Chirpstory for the event here.

In many ways the event revealed the broader problems with discussions around smart cities. There is the aspirational vision – cleaner, less-congested, less polluted and more prosperous cities – contrasted with the complex reality of current “smart” ICT projects, often mired in difficulties around business models, administrative jurisdiction, privacy and security issues and any number of other complex multi-stakeholder problems that crop-up when you try and integrate the physical and digital worlds; problems which go far beyond the scope of a simple technological fix.

The day started with an intoduction by Larry Hirst of the Digital City Exchange and Imperial College and Neelie Kroes of the European Commission, and a laying-out-of-issues by David Gann, the principle investigator of the Digital City Exchange.  The vision of the Digital City Exchange is to create the equivalent of a telephone exchange for a city’s data. This platform will then be accessed by citizens, businesses and city administrators to assist decision making, create products and services and inform city management. The key point about this exchange is that it seeks to be an exchange for all types of sectoral data: energy, transport, health, waste, environmental and any other areas you can think of to place a sensor. This goes far beyond the sectoral approach we see in many projects.

The imperative for such projects was underlined by Manel Sanromá, CIO of the City of Barcelona who pointed out that the human race is becoming steadily more urban, a process that has been going on for millennia. A result of this fact is that it is the quality of life that is available in the cities that is going to determine how we live in the future, because although you “can’t guarantee that France, the United Kingdom and the United States will be around in a thousand years, you can be virtually certain that Paris, London and New York will be”.

As such, cities themselves, through offices such mayors and other municipal offices that currently seem to be  undergoing a renaissance, are going to be the source of the impetus for moving to a smarter urban future.

Interesting themes that emerged from subequent sessions included:

The human element: the unpredictability of human nature and the risk of making any broad predictions about how the “human agent” will react when embedded in a smart city. A point raised in both the Transport session by panellists Sue Flack, Anders Roth and Jeremy Green, and by Nilay Shah in his “View from the Top” session as he tried to imagine what a smart city would look like using the tools of process engineering.

What is a smart city?: This is likely to differ from city to city, but what are the essential elements and what is the essential infrastructure needed before you can even think about calling yourself one?

Governance: we may use phrases such as “managing the smart city”, but more often the level of decision making is unclear, a hierarchy and decentralisation are often suggested but we still don’t know who to go to for a particular kind of decision.

Who will pay?: Something of an old warhorse in debates about almost any topic, but one that is particularly uncertain when business models are as contested as they are in the digital environment. A point made strongly by Allan Mayo of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills who said the assumption that it was all going to be paid for by advertising was naïve.

The smart cities agenda suffers from a certain amount of tension between a bottom-up versus top-down approach. The former is responsive, but limited in scope by barriers between sectors and the latter is slow to develop and ill-defined, but necessary if the full potential of the agenda is to be realised. Hopefully the Digital City Exchange will go some way to filling this lacunae.

29th November – 2nd December 2011, Barcelona, Spain

by Francesca Bria

The first Smart City Expo hosted more than 50 cities around the world, 118 businesses, over 6000 participants and 2000 panellists. The Expo announced the creation of a global Network of Smart Cities coordinated by the City of Barcelona, encompassing cities and businesses around the world. The objective is to promote policy actions and activities in this new field, by creating global common standards and criteria for the effective implementation of smart cities at a global level. The Expo was a meeting point for professionals active in the field of digital future cities, including heads of public administrations, practitioners and academics. Barcelona has made extensive investments and policy commitments with the intention of becoming one of Europe’s leading smart cities, promoting big innovation policy initiatives such as launching Barcelona Smart City Campus next to the 22@ district, an urban hub for businesses, innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. The conference organisers invited speakers of the highest rank such as Carlo Ratti, Director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, Anthony Townsend Research Director of the Institute for the Future, Jeremy Rifkin founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Abha Joshi-Ghani Manager of Urban Development of the World Bank, Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, Adam Greenfield, founder and managing director of Urbanscale.

Developing the smart and sustainable cities of the future is not an easy undertaking at a time of urgent societal challenges such as financial crises, environmental disasters, climate change, ageing populations and increasing unemployment. All these issues will require innovative solutions that challenge traditional ways of doing things. Organisations are required to move from closed innovation models to open and collaborative innovation models that can unleash the power of social production and collective intelligence.

It’s not just about the technology

One of the most challenging issues addressed during the different panels at the Expo was  that smart cities are clearly not only about ‘plumbing’ or a ‘technological fix’. On the contrary smart cities need to solve societal challenges through future technologies following a holistic approach that integrates technological innovation with urban planning, sociology and anthropology. For instance ‘defining innovative social meaning of technologies and investigating how urban technologies will impact public services and people’s lives’ are, according to Jonathan Wareham Vice-Dean of Research at Esade Business School, amongst the most exciting research questions. Integrating non technological elements, such as social relationships, institutions and social norms is going to be challenging, but that’s where the big impact will lie, leading to the discovery of new services that will transform people’s lives.

Innovation in smart cities

These issues focussed on civic innovation were further discussed during a panel moderated by Esteve Alimirall titled ‘Open innovation for developing smart cities’. I was one of the panellists together with Jake Barton and Peter Corbett, both members of Code for America, one of the most interesting projects worldwide on open innovation in the public sector. In the panel I emphasised the importance of creating collective action and awareness, moving beyond the things that IT is already good at doing (such as data aggregation, sensing, tracking) to more complex aspects of social and collective intelligence. As Jeremy Rifkin reminded us in one stimulating debate during the Expo, what is happening with the smart cities is a new revolution in which new distributed energy models will shift towards a system similar to an ‘internet of global energy’, with a multitude of nodes with the capability to produce and distribute energy. This revolution according to Rifkin will provide an opportunity to create thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. From a more critical perspective Adam Greenfield, the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing stressed the need for open civic innovation to emerge. According to Greenfield, there is no such a thing as a smart city, the city should empower people that can become smarter and collectively shape and transform the urban environment.

Cities in the driving seat

The public sector, and specifically cities, have an important role to play as the orchestrators of urban innovation platforms. Urbanization is occurring at a rapid rate; in 2050 75% of the population will live in cities. Cities can then set the rules of the game, building smart cities as open cities that facilitate innovation ecosystems to emerge, creating new entrepreneurial opportunities and jobs for future generations. This is why the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development is supporting 13 pilots in European cities that are developing smart applications in areas ranging from transport, education, health and environment.

Smart City Expo & World Congress will host again the second edition next November 2012.

Thursday 17^th November 2011, St. James’ Park, Newcastle

By Claire Thorne

Just in case you were exhausted from Day 1, or you weren’t quite paying attention at 9 am, Prof Don Marinelli was on hand. Delivering his keynote, entitled ‘A Curriculum for the 21st Century: Storytelling, Architecture, Technology & Experience’ , with all the gusto and drama of (a State-side) Brian Blessed, Don spoke and we all listened. He presented the innovative and multidisciplinary Master of Entertainment Technology – focusing on Storytelling, Architecture, Technology and Experience – at Carnegie Mellon University which he co-founded (watch co-founder Randy Pausch’s ‘last lecture’). The course abandons all traditional, formal teaching methods, valuing ‘edu-tainment’ and choosing to view “education as business”, boasting Star War’s C-3PO amongst its Faculty. In practice, this means a questionable non-curriculum of zeppelin rides and white-water rafting, students owning all IP and Don enforcing a somewhat brutal ‘no scholarship rule’.

Don’s examples of MET outputs included MyStoryMaker (software designed to encourage children into Carnegie Library to write, rather than borrow, books) and synthetic interviews for bringing late, scientific legends ‘back to life’. Don’s vision of the future, “making Computer Science a performing art”, includes progress in the areas of augmented reality, 4D immersive experiences and casual gaming.

[Dates for your diary: The 2012 Digital Economy All Hands, hosted by dot.rural, the Aberdeen research Hub, will take place at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre on October 23-25 2012.]

Dr Dominic Price’s (Horizon Digital Economy research Hub) contribution to the Crowd-sourcing session, entitled ‘A Framework for Crowd-Sourcing Personal Data’, introduced the Datasphere application as a ‘personal container’ . The Datasphere offers a way for individuals to track and manage access to their personal information, maintaining privacy levels by granting selective access in response to third party ‘queries’.

In the Open Data and Security session, Dr Andrew Garbett presented Lincoln University’s work on ‘Using social media to drive public engagement with open data’ . Referring to the ‘HM Government 2011 Making Open Government Data Real: a public consultation’ publication and the importance Government places on engagement with data for new revenue streams, Andrew emphasised “the need for public services to interface with this [crime, NHS, travel and transport] raw data”. The London Live Tube Map, the London Bike Share Map and Mash My Gov were just a few example applications Andrew mentioned where the service is good but not quite tailored to the user. Andrew’s work on FearSquare – where UK crime statistics (based on location habits) and social media are combined for a user-personalised local crime app – echoed many of the applications showcased at DE All Hands 2010 (e.g. VoiceYourView ) and at the recent Silicon Valley Comes to the UK appathon . FearSquare raised some concerns from the audience; namely the developer’s responsibility to stop perpetuating negative connotations of Open Data, reinforced by nomenclature like FearSquare.

Dr Jenny O’Connor and I popped off for a quick tour of the conference venue: St James’ Park (aka ‘the Sports Direct Arena’ )…

The afternoon session on ‘Support Services for Assurance and Reassurance’ spanned the topics of privacy, energy and access. When presenting on ‘Privacy Preserving Personalisation via Dataware’, Dr James Goulding declared “in the Digital Economy, data is currency” before featuring… quilting! James then went on to categorise the current market place as an Oligopoly with just two to three major players dominating each service sector, leaving little/no motivation for innovation. James’ future work will be based on combining Dataware (a Chrome application which builds a model of you, based on your interest areas) with Horizon’s Geostore. In the same session, Ian Dent presented Horizon’s work on ‘Creating Personalised Energy Plans’ and the DESIMAX project, demonstrating strong links with Low Carbon London. As Ian and his colleagues jostle with 20-year old data sets, he appealed for access to data and suggested opportunities for collaboration.

Unfortunately the quick-fire session, like the workshops, offered few exciting updates on (repackaged) work featured at last year’s DE All Hands meeting . Meanwhile, there were just a couple, rare glimpses of Social Science research and any realised/projected Impact(s) in the DE space, i.e. the work and context that promise to put the ‘society’ in the Digital Economy.

So, what’s the verdict? Two (and a half) days later and I’m left wondering: Where’s the ‘global’ in all of this? Where’s the ‘economy’? Cue Digital City Exchange (paper [pdf], poster (low resolution) [jpg]).