Becoming a Smart City: policy setting, a case study and planning core infrastructure

I’ve come across some items that a relevant to city governments looking to plan for strengthening or widening their delivery of e-government services.

Starting with the high-level: an attempt by David Osimo to co-create the agenda for an EU get together:

• Co-creating an open declaration on public services 2.0
  In November 2009, as every two years, the EU Ministerial declaration on e-government will be published at the Malmo conference. This is an important and welcome action; however, we feel current e-government policies have much to learn from bottom-up innovation happening on the web. We believe that public debate and collective intelligence can make a positive contribution to improve public policy in this field. We aim therefore to build a bottom-up open declaration alongside the official, ministerial declaration.How to do that? We are now opening the collective brainstorming. We will collect and discuss the top recommendations to governments on how to best use the Internet in public services.
  (tags: egovernment project:smartcities internet events collaboration)

The evolving list of ideas can be found here.

Next, a showcase of what can be achived by a city-state:

• Pep-Net – Pan European e-Participation Network » Blog Archive » Luxembourg : a city turned to the e-future
  The e-city Coordination initiative, in partnership with other Luxembourgish municipalities, European cities, public bodies, associations, citizens and businesses, aims at providing multichannel e-services to citizens. The project coordinates ICT-projects along the line of the City of Luxembourg’s technological and strategic plan respecting its political and administrative interests.The e-City Coordination is a component of the e-Luxembourg programme.

  E-Luxembourg is a two-folded programme included in the overall e-Europe framework. On one hand, it includes the e-Government initiatives of the State of Luxembourg and, on the other hand, the e-Commune programme of the inter-municipal union.

  (tags: project:smartcities europe egovernment communications)

I wonder if things are easier for city-states because they don’t have to worry about communicating or allocating work between the different levels of government: services are all provided from one place?

And finally, management of digital identity is a more technical issue, but is vital to the evolution of e-government. Kim Cameron is one of the core researchers in this area:

• Proposal for a Common Identity Framework | IdentityBlog – Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet’s Missing Identity Layer
  Attempts to crisply articulate the requirements in creating a privacy-protecting identity layer for the Internet, and sets out a formal model for such a layer, defined through the set of services the layer must provide. It aims at combining the ideas set out in the Laws of Identity and related papers, extended discussions and blog posts from the open identity community, the formal principles of Information Protection that have evolved in Europe, research on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), outputs from key working groups and academic conferences, and deep experience with EU government digital identity initiatives.The paper is the outcome of a year-long collaboration between Dr. Kai Rannenberg, Dr. Reinhard Posch and Kim Cameron.
  (tags: framework identity research project:smartcities privacy security)