Dear Smart City, where do we start?

We're happy to announce the start of the smarticipate project. Fraunhofer IGD and wetransform teamed up with eight partners from five countries to work on an answer for the burning question of Smart Cities denizens:

"How can I best improve the urban environment I am in right now?"

Currently, Smart Cities mostly collect data and provide it to select experts, such as urban planners. Going forward, we believe the insights gained from this data also have to be available to citizens and businesses. The information has to be accessible and usable – there has to be a proper dialog between the smart city and its smart citizens.

Through the apps and services the group builds, citizens will be able to engage in a dialog with the smart city. They will see its information like an additional layer on reality, and be able to act on it. They push and pull interactions with public authorities, business and other citizens. Citizens create projects or get notified of them as they move along their daily life. They contribute in playful, constructive ways, to make the best possible impact. This is key for cities like Rome, London and Hamburg – our project pilot sites – that want to reach out to citizens and get them engaged in constructive and creative ways.

wetransform will help the project to manage and integrate both baseline open data and content generated by citizens. The work we do will include setting up our platform for designing, transforming and publishing data sets in open standards, such as CityGML or INSPIRE. In the next weeks and months, expect to hear more about the data management and harmonisation challenges that a smart city project encounters, and how we resolve them!