On Thursday Sami and I visited “Connected Smart Cities – Towards Digital Sustainable and Open Communities” conference in the Helsinki City Hall. The conference was organized/sponsored by the EU, Forum Virium, Culminatum and city of Helsinki. (Twitter commentary at #connectedsmart)
“City development and initiatives are based on finding new and innovative ways of using information and communication technologies to support the planning and implementation of new strategies and services, which will contribute to urban sustainability, paving a way for the new Digital Agenda for Europe.”
—Part of conference description
This opening session of the conference focused on the different European strategies of how to become a Smart City. Distinguished, high level speakers from across Europe, including Mayors, Directors and experts, provided perspectives on issues relevant to sustainable and open Smart Cities and European Innovation Strategies.
The afternoon session addressed Living Labs, Future Internet based services and Smart Cities from ongoing cross-border city initiatives in the fields of Open Innovation, Public Private Partnerships and Future ICT enabled services.
Biggest constructive criticism would probably go beyond this conference, somewhere to the digital heart of EU. We saw several EU level programs and initiatives that had truly epic acronyms and high flying ambitions. However, many of them seemed near-copies of each other. Like a more daring speaker in the afternoon sessions said, statistically 4/5 of these projects will fail. He also warned that often these projects are not designed to be self sustaining economically, and die as soon as the initial funding is used.
It was starting to sound like perhaps some more entrepreneurial spirit and market realism would do some good for some of these projects. There seemed to be some confusion between the importance of ICT vs. people. Many speakers voiced that we have to start from the people and think how they can be helped, but at the same time those epic EU programs seemed to claim that anything that just has “ICT in it” will get funded. For awhile I was confused; is the aim to design for people or simply grow the ICT industry?
After interesting and inspiring presentations, given by folks from Demos, WA Research, City of Barcelona, SITRA and IBM, we were much more confirmed, though, that things have to change and that they also are changing. Roope Mokka’s presentation (embedded above) nicely frames some of the problem scope in EU and the need to do something now.
Also the simple amount of speakers banging our heads with projects about Open Data, sensors, Internet of Things, Fablabs and whatnot really made us believe that this stuff is a priority in EU. These things exists to solve systemic wicked problems and are not just Internet fads. We have believed so all along. Now, let’s get to work on these problems. (In fact, we are already, which is nice.)
Until next week.
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