The Smart Cities Council has the following annual program rewarding cities that offer winning proposals for “smart city” improvements. The finalist projects, listed below, offer suggestions for possible “smart cities” technology improvements to local governments everywhere. Read More
What SMART Stuff Are Cities Buying Now?
The concept of “Smart Cities” has crossed the threshold of most US City and Town Halls. But there are many different interpretations of what “SMART” might mean. And there are more criteria for what is urgent, affordable and practical. For those municipalities who may be wondering what others are investing in, Nick Schiffler has put… Read More
Procurement: Boston Story
Laura Melle, on the City of Boston Office of Technology team, was assigned to support the evolving departmental procurement process, provided the background information for this story. The Office of Technology “inbeds” data oriented staff in key line departments to build support for and overcome the challenges to bringing these departments into “smart cities” status.… Read More
Procurement: Town of Arlington MA Story
Arlington is a “town” in the New England parlance of local government. It has a Board of Selectmen instead of a city council and its chief legislative body, Town Meeting meets several days each spring, to address major town issues, warrants and to pass the town budget. The Town meeting opens each season with… Read More
Procurement: Kansas City MO Story
Kathy Garman and Cedric Rowan, KCMO employees working with procurement issues (11/15), provided most of the information and insights into new ways Kansas City is acquiring technology to enable it to develop into a leading 21st century smart city. City policy in Kansas City MO is very sensitive to the “digital divide” issue. The city… Read More
Procurement: Philadelphia PA Story
Nick Susi, provided the background information for this story. Nick previously worked in the Philadelphia Office of Information and Technology (OIT) and now works in the Procurement Dept., bringing with him to procurement a greater than usual appreciation for the complexities of buying 21st century ICT and digitally enhanced hardware and infrastructure using the traditional… Read More
Procurement: City’s Pre-Procurement Pathway
(Part of a series of articles prepared by Barbara Thornton for the Smart Cities Council. The articles are intended to provide an overview to city, private, nonprofit and community based stakeholders who hope to move city operations into the 21st century but run into 19th and early 20th century procurement processes. These are the processes… Read More
Europe Moves Forward On Software Platform Idea To Make Cities Smart
Asset Stewardship has long advocated a basic “platform” approach for municipalities entering the digital age. A platform or framework approach allows data to be gathered across departments to do predictive analysis for the city’s needs and to work more effectively on behalf of the citizens shared by multiple city departments. According to a recent article… Read More
Global City Challenge 2016 Registration
Initial teambuilding workshops for the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) will take place November 12-13, 2015, at NIST’s Gaithersburg, Md., campus. Registration for the workshop is open. Please use this link to register:http://www.nist.gov/cps/global-cities-team-challenge-2015.cfm. An agenda and additional materials related to the November teambuilding workshop are forthcoming. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s… Read More
White House Announces $160MM “Smart Cities” Initiative
The Obama administration, in conjunction with the Smart Cities Council Annual Meeting, on Sept. 14, announced $160mm in federal research, grants and collaborations to help local communities manage major challenges using 21st century tools. As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing: More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed… Read More
Build A City IT Master Plan
Cities started master planning in response to the evolution of zoning law which initially gave municipalities the power to determine land use patterns for commercial, residential, industrial and open space uses. The practice of land use planning through zoning has evolved and resulted in many new tools for shaping the City’s growth, economic health, housing,… Read More
City Software: From Silos to Platform
By Barbara Thornton. Originally published 9-27-14 as a guest post in Sangeet Paul Choudary‘s blog Platform Thinking, The New Rules of Business in a Networked World. This post leverages the Magnet – Tools & Rules – Data framework that Choudary first alluded to in a Harvard Business Review article here. In this post, Barbara uses this Platform Thinking… Read More
Feds Offer Bigger Playbook for Guiding Government Managers into Digital Era
On August 3, 2014 AssetStewardship.com posted Top 10 Tasks Required For Cities Acquiring Digital Software to help remedy the dearth of guidelines for municipalities investing in IT. Not to be outdone, the federal government, on August 12, 2014, launched the U.S. Digital Service and presented a Digital Services Playbook. We like this a lot. There is a… Read More
Boston New Urban Mechanics Office Leads Civic Tech Implementation
Boston, the “City on a Hill”, prides itself as a thought leader on topics of philosophy (transcendentalism), political theory (John Adams, Declaration of Independence) and public policy (Boston’s implementation of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act) for over 300 years. Clearly the City of Boston hasn’t always got it right. But the City gets big credit for… Read More