Living in a Hyper-Connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled

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Nirvesh Sooful Chief Executive Officer (CEO) African Ideas Living in a Hyper-connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled 1

description

Cities are where the action is. That's where innovation is happening. A city is an interconnected system of systems. Infrastructure, people, processes and technology make a city. In modern cities, there's a lot of data about everything. Lots of sensors are already deployed everywhere - in buildings, roads, and utility grids; and lots of new information-based processes are in place. Everything is more information-rich, so you have to think about information as another significant resource you use to manage city life. Citizens are also more connected than ever before, they have access to a lot more information, and have powerful platforms of their own. Big data, mobile, social media, cloud, digital inclusion, open data, broadband, etc. are powerful forces that will impact on cities now and in the future - creating both opportunities and challenges for cities. This case study explores the digital enablement of one large South African city. In 2000, the newly formed metropolitan City of Cape Town adopted the “Smart City” strategy, which was a turnaround strategy for the city aimed at information-enabling all key business processes in the city and embarking upon a modernisation programme to deliver services based on real information emanating from the ground (operations). This case study looks both at what has been done in the 13 years since the Smart City strategy was adopted, as well as what needs to be done in a future hyperconnected world. In addition to being of relevance to government leaders, the presentation should be of relevance to all CIOs and business leaders on how today’s new technologies, global competition and new business models will shift the focus from an internal efficiency view to a more outside-in view of the digital world and the role of their organisation within it.

Transcript of Living in a Hyper-Connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled

Page 1: Living in a Hyper-Connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled

Nirvesh Sooful Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

African Ideas

Living in a Hyper-connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled

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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

African Ideas – who we are • Strategic consultancy helping Governments to accelerate the benefits of ICT

enabled change through transformation of the public sector and the wider economy. Operates primarily in the ICT4D space.

• Key projects – Western Cape Broadband – Strategy & Digitisation Readiness Advisory Service – Western Cape Municipal ICT roadmap – Municipal Shared Service Solution (Cloud based) – ICAN Centres (Digital Inclusion) – WIFI Mesh (Rural – Saldanha, Urban – Khayelitsha & Mitchells Plain) – Rethinking Libraries (Libraries of the future) – Community spaces of the future – E-enabling Education (utilising broadband)

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“dropping a stone, or even a drop of water, in a pond causes ripples to emanate from the source, getting bigger and bigger the further away from

the source they get. This is a powerful example of small changes causing large and far-

reaching effects” At African Ideas, we specialise in working with our clients to identify these ‘big lever’ projects – the projects which, when embarked upon, will set the necessary ripples in motion to drive change and transformation throughout an eco-system. In this way we aim to have a profound effect on the society in which we operate.

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Introduction – who am I? • Involved in the IT industry for over 25 years • Many large, complex, innovative and award winning projects • Spent 10 years at City of Cape Town. First CIO of Metro city. • Architect & driver of the “Smart City” strategy - turnaround

strategy for the city aimed at information-enabling all key business processes in the city & embarking upon a modernisation programme to deliver services based on real information emanating from the ground (operations)

• Currently CEO of African Ideas. Also Strategy & Readiness Advisor to Western Cape Broadband Programme

“Nirvesh is the architect and driver of the City’s Smart City strategy, which Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Cassaburri in January 2005, called a “visionary transformation strategy,” which positioned Cape Town “to become one of our most technologically advanced cities” and “a frontrunner in South Africa’s National IT Strategy”. The strategy also focuses on how to harness the power of ICT to meet the development needs of the city and all its citizens.

While at the City of Cape Town, Nirvesh has implemented some of the largest ICT enabled business transformation projects in South Africa, creating billions of Rands of value for the City. These have resulted in the city winning numerous national and international awards including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award and the 21st-Century Achievement Award from the Computerworld Honors Programme. In September 2007, Nirvesh received a Provincial Honour Award from the Premier of the Western Cape as a person “rendering exceptional achievements and exceptional meritorious service in the interest of the Western Cape.”

ITWEB July 2008

Presenter
Presentation Notes
Spent 10 years at City of Cape Town. He was the first CIO of the metropolitan City of Cape Town. In that role he was the architect and driver of the “Smart City” strategy, which was a turnaround strategy for the city aimed at information-enabling all key business processes in the city and embarking upon a modernisation programme to deliver services based on real information emanating from the ground (operations). This programme was a huge success, winning several international awards - Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award (Berlin, 2003), 21st-Century Achievement Award from the Computerworld Honors Programme (Washington DC, 2004) and African ICT Achievers Award (2002, 2003) - and becoming a global best practice for public sector organisations.
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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

Scene Setting

4

Ubiquitous Information Access

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Era I: Automation, Cost Control and Efficiency

Era II: Productivity and End - User Empowerment

Era III: Value Creation and Business Effectiveness

Internet/Network Computing

Mainframe/Midrange Computing

Client/Server Computing

IT Impact

on Business Structure

Low

High

Era IV: IT Enabling New Business Models

The Rules

Internally Focused

Externally Focused

Source: Gartner

Key Issue

IT’s Changing Destiny Evolving IT Investment Drivers and Technology Cycles

Era I: Automation, Cost Control and Efficiency

Era II: Productivity and End - User Empowerment

Era III: Value Creation and Business Effectiveness

Era IV: IT Enabling New Business Models

The Rules

Era V: Digitisation Hyper-connected world

Outside in – the impact of digitisation on the enterprise

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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

More than ever, human life revolves around the city One hundred years ago, 2 out of every 10 people lived in an urban area. By 1990, less than 30% of the global population lived in a city, but as of 2010, more than half of all people live in an urban area. By 2050, this proportion will increase to 7 out of 10 people.

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Source: UN, Department of Economic & Social Affairs, Population Division

Presenter
Presentation Notes
For the first time ever, the majority of the world's population lives in a city, and this proportion continues to grow. One hundred years ago, 2 out of every 10 people lived in an urban area. By 1990, less than 40% of the global population lived in a city, but as of 2010, more than half of all people live in an urban area. By 2030, 6 out of every 10 people will live in a city, and by 2050, this proportion will increase to 7 out of 10 people. 
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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

Well Run

Opportunity

Inclusive

Caring

Safe

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Municipal Policing

Urban Planning & Environment

Sport & Recreation

City Administration

Community Services

Emergency Services

Primary health care Economic & Social

Development

Public Housing

Roads, Stormwater & Transport

Solid Waste / landfill, removal & area cleaning

Water & Sanitation - storage, treatment & distribution

Electricity - distribution & retail

The city is a microcosm of the major challenges and opportunities facing the planet today—intensified and accelerated.

Here, all man-made systems come together and interact with one another.

The information/ ICT challenge

• Leveraging information to make better decisions • Anticipating problems to resolve them proactively • Co-ordinating resources to operate effectively

Cities are amazing places

Presenter
Presentation Notes
Leveraging information to make better decision Cities are amazing places. Inter-connected systems, etc. Lots of effort has been put on administration and enabling the organisations (operations). Examples But it has been an inside out view. What’s coming, is that we need to take more cognisance of the outside in view. Presentation structured in two parts First part is on what we did in the last decade – effectiveness and efficiency within the enterprise Second part is on what is coming
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In 2000 City of Cape Town had to merge 7 previously autonomous local government administrations and become a single integrated metropolitan City, but it found that creating a Unicity to be complex due to:

“Lack of standardised financial policies and procedures”

“Each Administration / Directorate ran its own IT systems, many of which did not meet business requirements and were not properly integrated”

“Paper based processes where labour intensive, prone to error and information could not be shared.

“Difficulty in merging these systems was in fact hindering the merger of the administrations and undermining the objectives which motivated the creation of the Unicity”

“To utilise ICT as a key enabler to ensure integration, facilitate the merger and bring

about organisational transformation.” Thereby, enabling the City to deliver on its

Strategic Objectives”

Blaauwberg

Tygerberg

Oostenberg

HelderbergSouth Peninsula

CapeTown

CAPEMETROPOLITAN

AREA

City of Cape Town

Smart City Program

Objectives

Transforming Cape Town

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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

• Lack of / Poor service delivery (water, sanitation, electricity, refuse removal)

• Lack of communication with communities • Corruption and Nepotism • Financial mismanagement and Maladministration • Outstanding debt payments for municipal services • Lack of capacity – poor project planning, poor management and/or

under-spending by municipalities • Government officials who spend time focusing on their personal

business interests at the expense of service delivery. • Violation of MFMA & Supply Chain Mgt - results in tender

irregularities, fuels corruption, erodes confidence in municipal leadership and compromises service delivery.

• Poverty and unemployment

Many of the issues that we were facing then, still plague local government in SA today

A REPORT ON THE CURRENT ‘SERVICE DELIVERY PROTESTS’ IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Commissioned by the House Chairperson Committees, Oversight and ICT, Parliament of South Africa, 2009

So, the key question is: Can ICT be used to help government deal with these business issues?

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Outstanding debt payments for municipal services

• Improved visibility and transparency of information on the new invoice, the ability for citizens to pay their accounts at any municipal pay point and the implementation of a call center to address billing queries.

• Revenue Services performed significant data alignment duties in converting data to SAP.

• Revenue enhancement interventions have received priority attention.

Calculation:

• 1% increase in the payment ration = R6 mil per month.

• ROI option: 90 % payment ratio was used as the baseline for this ROI study and only 11% of financial value of the increase above baseline has been used. = R224.6 mil.

• 100% option: Instead of allocating only 11% - if 100% allocation over 90% base is to be used the financial value would be = R794 mil.

How was the benefit realised?

12 Month Moving Average -Payment Ratio

82.00%84.00%86.00%88.00%90.00%92.00%94.00%96.00%98.00%

100.00%

Jul-0

3A

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3S

ep-0

3O

ct-0

3N

ov-0

3D

ec-0

3Ja

n-04

Feb-

04M

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4A

pr-0

4M

ay-0

4Ju

n-04

Jul-0

4A

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4S

ep-0

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Feb-

05M

ar-0

5A

pr-0

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Payment RatioROI Baseline

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Cash Position - City of Cape TownJune 2002 to July 2006

0

500

1,000

1,500

2,000

2,500

Jun-

02

Dec

-02

Jun-

03

Dec

-03

Jun-

04

Dec

-04

Jun-

05

Dec

-05

Jun-

06

R '0

00 0

00

Budget Actual Cash Position

Go-live

Financial mismanagement and Maladministration Net increase of R667mil between Sept ’03 (SAP go-live) and Sept ’04.

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Lack of Capacity

0

500 000

1 000 000

1 500 000

2 000 000

2 500 000

3 000 000

3 500 000 Inv Value per Day

Sum of Inv Value

01 0002 0003 0004 0005 0006 0007 0008 000

No Txns per Day

Sum of No Txns

Average Daily Value: R744,201 Average Daily No. of Transactions : 1140 Andre Stelzner, Director: IS&T, City of CT

“Another interesting area has been the automation of fuel payments through e-fuel system and interface into SAP. Through this we pay approximately R750 000 per day for fuel to the respective suppliers without any human intervention......

......What makes things even better is that the price is checked against contract pricing and payment is optimised to ensure that we only pay on due date. In the past we had the fuel supply cut to the city due to late payment, now nobody worries about it.”

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Lack of / Poor service delivery (water, sanitation, electricity, refuse removal)

All Services / Works Request follow the same process to overcome the challenge of initiating and tracking the diversity of services government is responsible for:

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Creating Citizen Value creates Citizen Loyalty.

Lack of communication with communities

• Citizens demand Private Sector Convenience: • Itemized Billing and Consolidated Invoicing. • Pay Municipal Account at any Cash Hall across the City, via

Internet, Debit / Stop Order, 3rd party vendors etc. • Centralised Call Centre for account queries and defect reporting. Citizens demand that their requests be actioned • Works Management via Generic Enterprise-wide Process. Citizens are looking for Flexibility of Service • Account available in 3 official Languages • Progress and other communications via multiple channels

including SMS Transparency in performance and operational reporting • Reports, tenders, performance, statistics, etc. available online

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Government officials who spend time focusing on their personal business interests at the expense of service

delivery.

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Help deal with poverty and unemployment • Large disparity in the socio-economic status of citizens.

Systems assist with – Identifying citizens which can – but don’t pay; versus – Citizens which do not have the means to pay. – Support the vulnerable members of society.

• Examples of social responsible Policies and Tariff- structures enable via the ERP Program: – Free Basic Utility Services. – Grants for the Indigent – Debt relief through arrangements and incentives

• Other ICT initatives – Smart Cape – reducing the digital divide and empowering

communities – Digital Business Centres – assisting small businesses – Learnerships, volunteerism and skills development

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Violation of MFMA & Supply Chain Mgt - results in tender irregularities, fuels corruption, erodes confidence in municipal leadership and

compromises service delivery.

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Mayor fights cash crisis

Effective Service Delivery and confidence in municipal leadership

Jun

200

1

Dec

200

0

Creation of City of Cape Town “Lack of standardised financial policies and procedures”

“Each Administration / Directorate ran its own IT systems, many of which did not meet business requirements and were not properly integrated”

“Paper based processes where labour intensive, prone to error and information could not be shared.

“Difficulty in merging these systems was in fact hindering the merger of the administrations and undermining the objectives which motivated the creation of the Unicity”

Launch of Smart City Programme

Mayor fights cash crisis

Go Live!!!!

Bill & Melinda Gates Access to Learning Award, Berlin, 2003

Jun

200

8

ComputerWorld Honours Programme 21st Century Achievement Award, Washington DC, 2004

Mayor fights cash crisis

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Implementing effective ICT in the Public Sector can help deal with

• Lack of / Poor service delivery (water, sanitation, electricity, refuse removal)

• Lack of communication with communities • Corruption and Nepotism • Financial mismanagement and Maladministration • Outstanding debt payments for municipal services • Lack of capacity – poor project planning, poor management

and/or under-spending by municipalities • Government officials who spend time focusing on their

personal business interests at the expense of service delivery. • Violation of MFMA & Supply Chain Mgt - results in tender

irregularities, fuels corruption, erodes confidence in municipal leadership and compromises service delivery.

• Poverty and unemployment A REPORT ON THE CURRENT ‘SERVICE DELIVERY PROTESTS’ IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Commissioned by the House Chairperson Committees, Oversight and ICT, Parliament of South Africa, 2009

People

Strategy

Process

Tech

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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

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However, that is only the start …

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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

Well Run

Opportunity

Inclusive

Caring

Safe

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Municipal Policing

Urban Planning & Environment

Sport & Recreation

City Administration

Community Services

Emergency Services

Primary health care Economic & Social

Development

Public Housing

Roads, Stormwater & Transport

Solid Waste / landfill, removal & area cleaning

Water & Sanitation - storage, treatment & distribution

Electricity - distribution & retail

The city is a microcosm of the major challenges and opportunities facing the planet today—intensified and accelerated.

Here, all man-made systems come together and interact with one another.

The information/ ICT challenge

• Leveraging information to make better decisions • Anticipating problems to resolve them proactively • Co-ordinating resources to operate effectively

Cities are amazing places

Presenter
Presentation Notes
Leveraging information to make better decision Cities are amazing places. Inter-connected systems, etc. Lots of effort has been put on administration and enabling the organisations (operations). Examples But it has been an inside out view. What’s coming, is that we need to take more cognisance of the outside in view. Presentation structured in two parts First part is on what we did in the last decade – effectiveness and efficiency within the enterprise Second part is on what is coming
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Broadband

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Broadband Western Cape Broadband – Proposed core backbone

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Western Cape Broadband – Access network coverage area

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Public Internet & Wireless mesh

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Public Internet & Wireless mesh

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Public Internet & Wireless mesh

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WIFI – Mitchells Plain Phase 5 Coverage

WIFI - Khayelitsha Phase 5 Coverage

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Public Internet & Wireless mesh

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WIFI – Mitchells Plain Phase 5 Coverage

WIFI - Khayelitsha Phase 5 Coverage

Source: http://digitalcivilization.blogspot.com/2010/11/freedom-from-wires.html

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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

Source: Bosch Internet of Things and Services Lab

Cities of the future: key issues

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• Interconnected Systems and the “internet of things”

Presenter
Presentation Notes
Interconnected Systems and the “internet of things” or what Gartner has been calling the Internet of everything in this conference In the future everything in a city, from the electricity grid, to the sewer pipes to roads, buildings and cars will be connected to the network. Buildings will turn off the lights for you, self-driving cars will find you that sought-after parking space and even the rubbish bins will be smart. The city becomes a living laboratory for smart technologies that can handle all major systems - water, transport, security, garbage, green buildings, clean energy, and more. We already know a lot about CCTV cameras being deployed for traffic management and safety & security. Increasingly intelligent sensors are being deployed for a wide range of city related services traffic management, dam level monitoring, environmental monitoring, pollution management, fire detection, electricity grid management, busses, etc. In Birmingham, lamp-posts are being fitted with sensors. In Norway, more than 40,000 bus stops are connected and even tweet. In Cape Town, usage of inner city parking bays are monitored via a wireless network that knows when the bay is empty and when it is being used, how long your car has been parked in a parking bay, etc. Potentially, you could be directed to empty parking bays as you enter the city. The data to do this already exists. At MIT's Senseable City Lab, 5,000 pieces of rubbish in Seattle were geo-tagged and tracked around the country for three months to find out whether recycling was really efficient. The so-called internet of things offers a new way to analyse and measure city life, from whether water pipes are leaking to how traffic is flowing on the roads and whether buildings are using energy in the most efficient way. And this data can be used in different ways. Rio is often used as an example of an emergent smart city of the future. Rio is set to to experience the full glare of the worldwide media in the next few years as it plays host to both the Football World Cup in 2014, followed by the Olympic Games two years later. It has built a Nasa-style control room where banks of screens suck up data from sensors and cameras located around the city. This means that officials from across the city can now collaborate to manage the movement of traffic and public transportation systems, while also ensuring that power and water supplies work more efficiently. A coordinated response can be rolled out in the event of a crisis, such as collapsing building. Transport systems can be shut down, emergency services mobilised and gas supplies can be cut off, while citizens can be informed of alternative routes via Twitter. China is busy building dozens of new cities and is starting to adopt huge control rooms like the one in Rio. However, there are differences in opinion on this. Andrew Hudson-Smith, director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College, London says that while a lot of the big technology firms are looking at the control room model, this is backward thinking. "Why put the technology in one room when you can put it in the hands of everyone?" he has asks. He and his team have created a city dashboard as part of plans to make London smarter. Like Rio's control room, the dashboard collates data such as pollution, weather and river levels. But it also looks at some things that Rio doesn't - such as what is trending on Twitter and how happy the city is. A version of the dashboard is hooked up on a wall of iPads in the office of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. They claim that this as powerful as the large scale control room but significantly cheaper. But more importantly, there is also a version available on the web, so that the public has the same information as the policy-makers and that has the potential to be incredibly powerful. And this leads me into the next key issue which deals with the Internet of users and the social web.
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Cities of the future: key issues

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hedonometer.org an instrument that measures

the happiness of large populations in real time

• Interconnected Systems and the “internet of things”

• Citizens having powerful platforms of their own

Presenter
Presentation Notes
Citizens having powerful platforms of their own And it is not just government that is interconnecting systems and monitoring things. Another chapter in the smart city story is being written by citizens, who are using apps, DIY sensors, smartphones and the web to solve the city problems that matter to them. Mobilitate is an online platform that enables citizens to actively participate in improving service delivery and holding local government accountable. Don't Flush Me is a neat little DIY sensor and app which is single-handedly helping to solve one of New York's biggest water issues. Every time there is heavy rain in the city, raw sewage is pumped into the harbour as the sewars and stomwater drains overflow. Using a sensor which measures water levels in the sewers and storm water drains and a smart phone app, Don't Flush Me lets people know when it is 'safe to flush'. The idea emerged from a group who experienced particularly sewage-laden water while canoeing. This is also an interesting example of how Cities and their citizens can work together to manage limited and over stretched infrastructure. Eskom's Power Alert system from 5 - 9 pm on TV is a non-internet enabled example of a similar system. Eskom's CEO Brian Dames has recently stated that this system has "helped keep the lights on this winter". The Air Quality Egg is a community-led sensor network designed to allow anyone to collect very high resolution readings of nitrogen oxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations outside of their home. These two gases are the most indicative elements related to urban air pollution that are sense-able by inexpensive, DIY sensor. The data is sent to the internet where it is integrated on a map to show pollution levels around the world. Researchers estimate that two million people die each year as a result of air pollution and as cities get more over-crowded, the problem is likely to get worse. Ushahidi is a nonprofit, open-source software company that develops a Web platform that makes it easy for people in any part of the world to disseminate and collect information about a crisis. Users can submit reports by text message, e-mail, or Web postings, and the software aggregates and organizes the data into a map or timeline. In addition to its crisis-mapping software, the company has also launched a product called Swift River that uses machine-learning algorithms to extract and organize accurate information from the flood of e-mails, text messages, blog posts, and tweets that can seem overwhelming in the first days of a crisis. Ushahidi’s crisis-mapping software was first used in early 2008 to track violent outbreaks related to the disputed Kenyan election of 2007, and it has been used since to coordinate everything from disaster relief following the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, to snow cleanup in New York City this past winter. Interesting anecdote about the City’s GIS information. About 11 years ago I had a discussion with the City’s GIS folk about making the GIS data and aerial photography available to the public. We felt that if we made these available, interesting applications could emerge from developers doing weird and wonderful things with it. We also thought that this could be a great tool to support the tourism industry in Cape Town as well as give developers a powerful dataset to showcase their skills. Remember that this was the days before google maps, etc. even existed. The GIS folk argued vehemently against this, saying that they had a valuable data set and that they had plans to sell this data. They argued that I was being short sighted and that they were going to generate significant revenue out of this dataset. As we all now know, today, citizens have a choice of GIS platforms that they can use with Google, Bing, etc. They can pinpoint their buildings and interest, explore 3-D renderings of the City, explore street views, upload their own pictures, use crowd sourcing of information to keep information up to date as well as for powerful things like Ushahidi. Yes, the city’s aerial photography is far superior to anything that the citizens have available on their free platforms, but the free platforms are far more useful to the citizens. And the city GIS people never did realise the massive revenues that they anticipated. They also now do expose some of this information via the web, however in a very closed and proprietary fashion (where it only works properly with Internet explorer) – and there is increasing pressure from people in the opendata world to make this information available as apis. Hedonometer is another interesting project which this year set out to map happiness and health levels in cities across the US using data from social media platforms. Such citizen generated data could be incredibly useful to city governments - informing them in real time about condition on the ground, what policies are needed in any given area and understanding the changes in the behaviour of their citizens. Powerful example of citizen collected and generated data. Examples of different types of applications (elaborate). Important point is that this data is being collected without government. It’s about citizens taking matters into their own hands. In this lies both a massive opportunity for government, as well as potentially a threat. The opportunity is to work with closely with your citizens to actively manage the city (as has been demonstrated by some of the examples). The threat is something that the business world is starting to understand – you cannot control the information and data in the way that it has been tightly controlled before. Data is being taken from multiple sources, mashed together, analysed and conclusions drawn. Some of this is from sources you control, but citizens also now have their own powerful sources of data – which means that they have power. And this is part of the big debate - Top down vs bottom up or Inside out vs Outside in, which leads me to the next key issue
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Cities of the future: key issues

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• Interconnected Systems and the “internet of things”

• Citizens having powerful platforms of their own

• Big data or Big brother (power & control)

Presenter
Presentation Notes
Big data or Big brother (power & control) Big data is very important, and is going to be very valuable. This is a major theme of this conference. Big data is often referred to as the “new oil” or the “Oil of the internet age”. And this is potentially a very valuable analogy. We also understand that in the fast moving consumer goods environment that the monetisation of this data is of paramount importance. And yet it is precisely this “new oil” analogy and slides such as this one that concern civic activists.
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Innovation Development Empowerment Action Solutions

Source:http://www.slideshare.net/gleonhard/data-is-the-new-oil-publicy-is-the-new-privacy-futurist-speaker-gerd-leonhard

Cities of the future: key issues

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• Interconnected Systems and the “internet of things”

• Citizens having powerful platforms of their own

• Big data or Big brother (power & control)

Presenter
Presentation Notes
In a lot of the technology company literature on smart cities, City inhabitants are “mainly addressed as consumers rather than as citizens”. Yes, the city is collecting all this data and they are building services on top of that and some of those services may be handy – but what if you want to do something else, something that’s not provided by the government themselves? If a group of citizens, for example, want to use that data to organise an action group against environmental pollution in their city the answer you get is not quite clear. In Cape Town there was a recent example of a woman who asked for data from a CCTV camera about an accident and was refused. At the moment it seems that the data platform is a closed platform and will be used for government or businesses to build services on top of them.” Anthony Townsend, director of the Institute of the Future and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia has said that "Some people want to fine tune a city like you do a race car but they are leaving citizens out of the process”. This is an age in which very big things can come from massively co-ordinated human activity that doesn’t necessarily get planned from the top down. We need to stop thinking about building smart cities like a mainframe – which is this industry vision – and think about it more like we built the web, as loosely intercoupling networks. What’s clear from the institutional point of view is that the Government now has competition in terms of organising and deciding – citizens can now do an awful lot themselves using new tools which they just couldn’t do before effectively. These are powerful platforms – citizens have toppled governments with these tools (like we have seen in Egypt and the occupy movements). They have real power. And that is the issue - these are two different approaches to building smart cities and they’re playing out in this much bigger struggle over control between people and government/ corporates. The reality is that a bit of both is needed. Some of the big infrastructural or planning decisions still need to be done in the traditional institutional approach, while a lot of other things can be done in a more bottom up or outside in view. We need to have a strategy that has both active government, as well as active citizens. However, this needs quite a radical rethink of the way we operate. Who has access to what, when and how? Who owns the data, how is it managed? How can we share some another’s information? How can privacy and security be maintained? Etc. These are the strategic issues that cities need to be thinking about. And they should be thinking about this together with their citizens.
Page 32: Living in a Hyper-Connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled

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Living in a Hyper-connected World – How Cities Need to get Smarter and More Digitally Enabled

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Thank You & Discussion