Projects reusing open data in Smart Cities, Part 2

Following initial contacts with Open Data and Smart Cities, the attendees at the International Open Data Conference enjoyed a second session dedicated to Open Data and Cities, moderated by Stephen Larrick from Sunlight Foundation, which gathered two experts from government bodies and two members of civil society to continue with the presentation of success cases worldwide.

It is estimated that 80% of Latin American population will live in cities in 2050. This demographic flow will arise new challenges in transport, education, waste management o housing, priority areas where open data can be a tool and response to those problems in future. The Inter-American Development Bank operates in this context, its representative Antonio Moneo was responsible for starting this panel describing the work of the IADB in the promotion of open data as the solution for current challenges in cities.

Within the different programs, the IADB helps and teaches towns in Latin America the potential of open data to face public problems and their possible impact to improve the life quality in urban areas. Thus, the Bank has helped Argentinian cities in their urbanistic planning, villages in Ecuador to manage natural disasters or Rio Janeiro in Brazil with the Zika epidemic. After all, according to Moneo’s words, in any process of information openness, the data are not the most important aspect, but the collaboration arose during the process to respond to specific necessities.

In the same continent, Eric Resee presented the project developed by the independent organization Bloomberg Philantrophics “What works cities: building capacity for open data in mid-sized cities”. An initiative within the Govex project which works with a network of 39 north american cities that lack of the necessary tools to re-use the open data in an efficient way. The entity helps those towns create sustainable open data programs that promote transparency and citizen participation. In this way, local governments would be able to incorporate data in their decision making to improve the operations in the city.

After his speech, it was local government representatives’ turn. Víctor Moran, from Zaragoza City Council, explained how the city’s open data portal works from the technical point of view and, lastly, Zira Rivera, coordinador of Smart-Dublin, showed the local initiative Dublinked, whose goal is promoting the development of innovative solutions based on open data, using the city as a test bed. Concurrently, this program plays two important roles: on one hand, it is an open data repository, published last march, with more than 300 datasets available for their re-use. And it is also a network that organizes regular events and activities to create an ecosystem for big and small companies, researches, public bodies and citizens interested in data.

In this regard, Zaira Rivera showed several projects such as DublinDashboard that provides visualizations based on open data from different sources or the funding program developed by the County Council to find solutions to road safety problems in the city, based on local open data.

After their speeches, an interesting discussion started where attendees had the opportunity to share their doubts with the experts. The global challenge that any Smart Cities addresses was highlighted: opening and bringing the accurate information for the specific needs of the citizen. Moreover, different methods to measure the impact of open data policies were analyzed showing how each project uses different performance indicators to assess its success.

In short, idea and knowledge sharing, real cases and, above all, commitment to build more intelligent and effective urban areas were the joint points of the community gathered at this session in the International Conference which, in its last edition, showed the good health of the Smart City and Open Data sector in the world.