Four examples of smarty city work from The Guardian

Examples of “smart” city activity from four places in the uk:

• Kirklees
• Sunderland
• Stoke-on-Trent
• Lambeth

In this piece on the Guardian website, including a quote from our own Rick Robinson about his work in Sunderland:

“Large organisations have different models and cultures to small-scale innovators. In our partnership with Sunderland and Sunderland software city, conversations across those different types of organisation build and reinforce trust and mutual understanding to form a ‘soft infrastructure’. This is every bit as important to incubating innovation as traditional ‘hard’ infrastructures such as office buildings and computing platforms.”

For more go here.

What will replace politics as usual in a smart city?

Can tactical urbanism, Internet journalism, direct action, “open data”, crowd-funding and social networking replace the comfortable business-as-usual model in which the various casts of the power elite scratch each others back within an established system of power-play and paybacks? Can these various types of free form action provide a solution that is at once local and complex and accessible and less corrupted?

Interesting post from the Community Architect Blog from Baltimore.

G8 Open Data Charter

Today the G8 has published an open data charter.  Nigel Shadbolt writes in the Telegraph about why this is important:

We need strong leadership from the top of the G8, committed officials within government, and a willingness to support those at the coalface: those who collect, generate, manage and oversee this new information revolution.

We need this innovation because we face unprecedented challenges as a society: an increasing population with very different demographics in different regions, environmental security, economic stability, growth and more.

We see open data as a crucial part of rising to these challenges. Quite simply open data is an enabler of freedom. Our freedom to trade, to learn, to be secure, and to our well-being as individuals, organisations, and as countries.

Done well, its impact will be material, measurable, and transparent.

Key points in the charter:

We, the G8 , agree that open data are an untapped resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.

We therefore agree to follow a set of principles that will be the foundation for access to, and the release and re use of, data made available by G8 governments. They are:

• Open Data by Default
• Quality and Quantity
• Useable by All
• Releasing Data for Improved Governance
• Releasing Data for Innovation

While working within our national political and legal frameworks, we will implement these principles in accordance with the technical best practises and timeframes set out in our national action plans. G8 members will, by the end of this year, develop action plans, with a view to implementation of the Charter and technical annex by the end of 2015 at the latest. We will review progress at our next meeting in 2014.

Here’s the document in full (odd for an open data document to be released as a PDF – but..)

Open Data Charter G8 June 2013

Note:  I sit on the CLG Local Public Data Panel – chaired by Nigel Shadbolt.