SMART CITIES

Smart Cities Research

Current Smart City research and development are focused on using hyperconnected field sensors to assess a community's health and validate initiatives' performance. While this is a good practice, it often ignores a crucial element of what truly makes up a smart city: its people. 

Where to Start With Smart Cities

Because there are many ways to approach being a smart city, this has created significant market confusion and multiple overlapping approaches to becoming a smart city. With this in mind, I collaborated with Chelsea Collier, the Founder of Digi.City and another Eisenhower Fellow, to create a free smart cities playbook for government officials. Click on the cover below to register and download your free copy.

Crowdsourcing Smart Cities

People are the smartest aspect of any city and are capable of far more than simply living in it. The best way to harness the power of people is to use technologies and methods to crowdsource insights from them.

Here are a few things people can do within a structured crowdsourced process:

  1. Identify and rank city issues

  2. Identify and rank potential city solutions

  3. Microtasking work on issues and/or solutions

  4. Fund solutions

  5. Implement solutions

  6. Validate solutions

When separate elements are combined they form a crowdsourced business process. 

The combination of multiple crowdsourced business processes forms a closed knowledge base.

The intelligent linkage of closed knowledge bases, accomplish through structured data standards, creates an open knowledge repository that would allow other cities to learn from one another by pooling collective intelligence from all city layers. 

Cover Photo Credit: Kim Seng