Barcelona Smart City Expo 2014: Sharing experiences of collaboration between cities

Artikkelikuva: Barcelona Smart City Expo 2014: Sharing experiences of collaboration between cities
The Smart City Expo World Congress is the leading international summit on smart cities. Forum Virium Helsinki participated the expo and moderated a session that brought together cities to discuss how knowledge, code and standards can be shared between cities in practise and what there is to gain from such in-depth collaboration.
 
The Smart City Expo World Congress brought together over 400 world cities, 300 speakers and the leading institutions and experts in charge of leading change and urban transformation. The conference and exposition was organised between the 18th and 20th November 2014 in Barcelona. 
 
The programme featured some of the most innovative speakers on the current urban and technological scene. It was structured around six main themes: Smart Society, Technology, Governance, Energy, Mobility and Sustainable City.
 
Focusing on the city collaboration
 
Our session was titled City to city collaboration: sharing knowledge, code and standards. It presented examples of smart cities collaborating and concretely creating shared resources – whether for digital services, code, standards or methodologies. We dived into the inspirational work of Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Gent, as well as networks like Eurocities and the Connected Smart Cities Network.
 
From Helsinki, the speakers included the Information Technology and Communications Director Jaakko Salavuo, who shared his thoughts on importance of collaborative efforts such as CitySDK. He was accompanied by Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Officer Ger Baron, the Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia Tim Wisniewski, e-strategist of the City of Ghent and co-chair of the Eurocities Open Data Working Group Bart Rosseau, and Dave Carter, the Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Urban Policy Studies at the University of Manchester.
 
In the presentations we learned, for example, how cities are creating ecosystems around open data and building a bigger market for applications and services. We also heard which methods cities have for joining forces to reuse digital services and collaborating both on code level. 
 
The session was full, and attracted around 100 participants. It was moderated by our Development Manager Hanna Niemi-Hugaerts, who has a strong focus on accelerating the use of data through CitySDK harmonized APIs and developer engagement activities such as Helsinki Loves Developers
 
For those interested in the session contents, there will be a possibility to hear the inspiring words of the presenters. Smart City Expo will be providing videos of all the sessions of the 2014 edition through their Youtube channel, so keep an eye on it.
 

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