Gkbediako CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons
As cities and councils create new smart city applications, data will play THE key role in realising success. While the infrastructure will serve as the engine, data sharing platforms will act as the fuel for building new applications across city resources and residents’ needs.
Now, you may be a bit fed up with half-baked analogies like “data is the new oil” or (in this case) “data sharing platforms are the fuel” …
So I want to explain why understanding the data angle is essential to anyone, in local or state government, stepping on the smart city merry-go-round.
The opening paragraph is not mine. I pinched it from Stuart Corner who quoted the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions Smart Cities Data Sharing Framework.
Some folk in local and state government may say: “I’m not technical and don’t want to be. While I’m interested in what technology might do for me (think iPhone) or for my community (think smart parking), I don’t want to have to understand dense techhie jargon. I have other things I’m paid to do.”
I would 100 percent agree.
I guess it’s up to people like me, Stuart Corner and others to help councils understand why this is fundamental.
So here goes.
If a council puts in a smart parking application, it helps the good guys (increased revenue, optimises parking availability, less stressful experience for people who want to visit/shop in/work in that area).
It then puts sensors in bins. Ditto. This reduces council costs, the area gets cleaner. Again less traffic congestion, everyone happy.
Both of these applications can collect enormous amounts of data. When the data is combined, it opens great insights. One real, live-today example is that it can help relevant stakeholders decide when, whether and where to build a giant new car-parking facility.
There’s the upside, the vision. First obstacle: privacy. Data from a bin-sensor alone may not impinge on any current privacy laws. It doesn’t contain significant information attributable to an identifiable individual.
However, if combined with other data gathered from smart lighting, traffic, micro-environment and other sensors – if all this data is put together and analysed, then it may indeed produce a wealth of knowledge about your personal habits, inclinations, stuff that (in Australia at least) is no-one’s business but yours.
So what to do? Should councils shrug and say, “I don’t currently own this data – it belongs to third- party providers – not my problem”? If they do, they miss the chance of getting the insights that enable that car park to be built in the right place (which may in fact be in another local area, not their own at all).
First, there has to be a council policy which both guards against possible privacy intrusions AND at the same time allows the data to be open enough that the council can access, recombine and analyse it when useful. Second, there have to be processes to enact the policy and take best advantage of these data insights.
To illuminate the importance, I’ll again (mis)quote Stuart Corner:
“a significant amount of data collected in a smart city never gets leveraged because of the challenges in interpreting data models and standards for using the data across platforms.”
Before paper money was invented, coins had value. A gold sovereign would be for a farmer, what winning Lotto is today. So I’m going to get away from ‘fuel’ and ‘oil’ and offer a new analogy:
As State and local governments create new smart city applications,data will play the key role in realising success. Secure and open data, minted in the furnace of a solid data policy framework, will act as gold coins for governments to spend on keeping up with, and ahead of, their citizens’ needs.
