New project: SmartCities 8 Oct 2008
Posted by Peter Cruickshank in Daily Links, Europe, e-government.Tags: community, e-government, e-service, edinburgh, Europe, north sea region, project
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I’m starting on a new project – SmartCities[1] – which is aimed at creating a community of practise between cities in the North Sea region, linking academics, business development agencies and city governments. ie What are cities in mature economies planning to do with their e-services, and how can their share their knowledge?
This gives a new theme for my links, starting with these:
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The IDeA works for local government improvement so councils can serve people and places better. It is owned by the Local Government Association and belongs to local government.
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A series of integrated technologies to support local authorities in providing their services electronically (led by Tim Anderson). Creator of the infamous IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary)
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Four priorities: 1 – Building on our Capacity for Innovation; 2 – Promoting the Sustainable Management of our Environment; 3 – Improving the Accessibility of Places in the NSR; 4 – Promoting Sustainable and Competitive Communities – funder of the SmartCities project.
One of the partners in City of Edinburgh Council:
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Background to motivators for the e-government unit at City of Edinburgh Council
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One half of an approach to develop service delivery that generates efficiencies from simplifying procedures to adopt best practise, standardising these approaches within and across organisations and ultimately sharing services.Benefits
- A simplified and standardised process model for local government
- Efficiencies achieved through reductions in duplication and points of integration
- Better services to customers through standardisation and improved technology
- Scaleable resilient technology able to adapt to future developments
- Improved quality of information
- Improved organisational flexibility.
Actually, I’m finding that much of the stuff I’ve found in my trawling around over the last year or tow is relevant, so I’ve also gone back and marked them with the ‘project:smartcities‘ tag over at del.icio.us.
Implicit in SmartCities are ideas around identity management, privacy and security, and use of Web2.0 and web services generally, so hang on in there – I’m not going away!
[1] Not the first time that ‘SmartCities’ has been used as a name for a project or a service, which could make things confusing…
Sound pretty interesting.
Maybe some of the cities involved would also be interested in joining PEP-NET (www.pep-net.eu) to further work in the field on eParticipation and eDemocracy in general.
That’s a good thought! There are definitely areas of overlap between what the cities are doing and e-participation. I guess the main issue is to present the cities with a useful resource/community of practise.
I’ll be at e-Democracy ‘08 on Novermber 11 – maybe we can discuss the options there if you’re around?