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The World Economic Forum has been appointed by the G20 to lead its Global Smart Cities Alliance on Technology and Governance, a global effort to establish universal norms and guidelines for implementation of smart city technology.
WEF said the alliance would unite municipal, regional and national governments, private-sector partners and cities’ residents around a shared set of core guiding principles for the implementation of smart city technologies.
“Currently, there is no global framework or set of rules in place for how sensor data collected in public spaces, such as by traffic cameras, is used. The [alliance] aims to foster greater openness and trust as well as create standards for how this data is collected and used.”
According to WEF, the move marks the first elevation of smart city technologies and global technology governance to the main G20 agenda.
WEGF said it would coordinate with members from the G20, Urban 20 and Business 20 communities to develop new global governance guidelines for the responsible use of data and digital technologies in urban environments.
The internet of things, robotics and smart cities team in WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network will take the lead and ensure accountability throughout the alliance’s members.
WEF president Børge Brende said the move represented a commitment from the largest economies in the world to work together and set the norms and values for smart cities.
“We will coordinate efforts so that we can all work in alignment to move this important work forward. It is important we maximise the benefit and minimise the risk of smart city technology so all of society can benefit, not the few.”
WEAF said public-private cooperation would be crucial to achieving global change, and the efforts to form the Global Smart Cities Alliance had been supported by four partners of the World Economic Forum: Eisai, Hitachi, NEC and Salesforce.
OASC joins G20’s smart city initiative
Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) has become one of the initial backers of the G20 Smart Cities Alliance. OASC said the overall aim of the collaboration was to promote responsible deployment and use of smart city technologies to address local challenges.
OASC bills itself as a non-profit with the goal of creating and shaping the nascent global smart city data and services market
It said it would world with WEF towards designing and implementing policy frameworks and programs to advance these efforts on a global scale.”
WEF’s Head of IoT, Robotics & Smart Cities, Jeff Merritt, said WEF and OASC had been working together for some time to support cities and communities worldwide.
ETSI smart city specs
In February this year ETSI released a set of specifications for data sharing in smart cities and in June new specifications for smart cities.
In May Harbor Research published a white paper in which it argued that the complexities of advanced smart city applications would require new data architectures and drive the success of a new generation of software players.
