Interesting smart government, smart cities and open government news from last week, collected by the FreeBalance Strategy & Innovation Group.
SOCIAL MEDIA LEADS IN SMART CITY CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT: The Equip to Innovate Survey from Governing and Living Cities identified social media and project websites as the most frequent methods of citizen engagement among American cities. The survey showed significant adoption of mobile apps, 311 systems and city hall meeting tools. Skip Descant, in Government Technology, reports on a study from the U.S Conference of Mayors that describes how city governments can engage citizens. Descant describes how smaller cities can create more direct relationships with citizens to create more tangible smart city initiatives.
FEDS FOCUS ON SMART CITY CYBERSECURITY AND PRIVACY: Bill Lucia from Route Fifty reports that the next Global City Teams Challenge, cosponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, will focus “privacy and cybersecurity issues. This comes at an opportune time in the modernization of smart cities practices because “the resilience of critical infrastructures, and of the assets that make up these infrastructures, is coming increasingly under the spotlight,” according to Dr. Peter Williams, the Chief Technology Officer, Big Green Innovations, at IBM. Writing in Meeting of the Minds, Dr. Williams describes the complexity of protecting city critical assets: “cities can be thought of as “systems of systems”, where energy, water, communications, transportation, healthcare, law and order, data, and other physical systems (not to mention social, political and economic systems) interact. From this perspective, many issues arise.”
SMART GOVERNMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE: Eyragon Eidam reports on a panel discussion about smart government in Government Technology. Eidam concludes that “after some deliberation, panelists seemed to settle on the idea that smart government means different things to different organizations, but agreed that the term followed in the footsteps of market-driven buzzwords that preceded it.”
IoT AT THE PEAK OF INFLATED EXPECTATIONS: David Oro reports on the latest Gartner Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle in IoT Central. The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered critical for smart city projects. The critical problem is that there are few interoperability standards or platform technologies to enable city-wide technology initiatives. Oro reports that IoT Platforms are at the peak of inflated expectations, 2 to 5 years away from mainstream adoption.