This document discusses smart cities and empowering citizens through open data and technology. It presents the principles of co-creation and making to help citizens understand and act in the world. Examples are given of how the CitySDK and Smart Citizen Kit can help cities share and reuse solutions by collecting, annotating, linking and distributing open city data in a standardized way. Guidelines are provided for smarter city design that engages citizens and favors interoperability through loosely coupled, reusable systems.

1. Smart Cities?
Smart Citizens!
Frank Kresin
Research Director
@kresin / frank@waag.org

2. Waag Society

3. Co-creation

4. Fablab – Makers Guild

5. Wetlab

6. Events

7. Designers & Artists 4 Genomics

8. Development Community

9. Principles:
Best producer is the user
(S)he can learn to make
anything
Sharing is key to innovation
Making is crucial to
understand & act in the
world

10. Creative Research

11. Bodyguard

12. Fairphone

13. Knowledge institutes
Developer hubs
Accelerators
Innovation labs

14. Open Data

15. City Service Development Kit
15
 Open, interoperable service
interfaces.
 Processes, guidelines and usability
standards.
 Sharing, re-using and transferring city
solutions across cities.
 Not inventing from the scratch, but
mapping, using & developing global best
practices

16. Example
Schools:
1. Is there a safe bicycle lane towards
them?
2. How about the air quality?
3. Any sports field around them?
4. How many schools does this
neigborhood need?
5. How about scores?

17. • Interview with alderman
• Contact details on web
• Three files from the Department of
Education
• One open data website
• Two spreadsheets
• Several PDF’s
Data Sources

18. Widely varying identicications
Statistics
Office
Education
Department
Public
Transport
Service
Budget Office
Emergency
Services
Administration nr.
Coordinates
Various ID’s
Address & timetables
Budget ID

19. For each school:
• 6+ queries
• 6+ results
- Files
- Databases
- Values
- Standards

20. • Labor intensive
• Wide margins
• Unreliable
• Not interoperable
Results

21. THERE ARE BETTER WAYS

22. CitySDK Linked Data
• Collects
• Annotates
• Links
• Distributes

27. CitySDK Architecture
App
Intelligence
CitySDK mob.
Data in silos
Data in cities

29. http://citysdk.waag.org/map

30. • RT mobility data
• BAG viewer
• Parking API
• Orphaned Bikes
• Tourism in Amsterdam
• Emergency services
• City Dashboard
Cases

31. http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/

32. http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/visualisation/

33. Smart Parking Reducing Mobility
http://www.parkshark.nl/

34. http://bomenapp.nl/

36. Smart Citizen Kit

37. Design Rules for Smarter Cities
• Your citizens know more than you.
• Prototype early and fast, engage the stakeholders, iterate quickly and be
prepared to start all over.
• Embrace self-organisation and civic initiative, but help to make the results
sustainable and scalable.
• Know what you are talking about in the face of technology. Never rely on
consultants that will sell you more consultancy, not solutions.
• Have binding decisions made at the lowest level possible and actively preach
self-governance.
• Favour loosely coupled, smaller systems over monoliths and mastodons, and
use peer-defined standards to glue together the parts. Small systems tend to fail
sometimes; large systems fail for sure.
• To raise and deserve trust, build systems based on data reciprocity and
transparency.
• Reuse existing parts and design your additions for reuse, adding to the public
domain and thereby strengthening its capacity to act and learn.
http://waag.org/nl/blog/design-rules-smarter-cities

38. Pointers
• Design Rules for Smarter Cities
http://waag.org/nl/blog/design-rules-smarter-cities
• Smart Citizens Publication
http://futureeverything.org/publications/smart-citizens/
• CitySDK Mobility API
http://citysdk.waag.org/api
• Open Design Now
http://opendesignnow.org/
• Smart Citizen Kit
http://www.smartcitizen.me/
• Apps for Europe - Turning Data into Business
http://www.appsforeurope.eu/

39. Piet Heinkade 181 a
1019 HC Amsterdam
waag.org
Thanks!
Frank Kresin - @kresin