Smart Urbana Workshops in the Municipalities
Two days joint workshops took place in the cities participated in Smart Urbana project implementation:
Alba Iulia Municipality, Romania 25-26 July 2017 (Responsible person for organisation from the Municipality side Mr Tudor Drambarean).
Municipality of Faro, Portugal, 28-29 August 2017 (Responsible person for organisation from the Municipality side Ms Cristina Viegas).
Municipality of Volvi, Greece, 14-15 September 2017 (Responsible person for organisation from the Municipality side Ms Thalia Valkouma and Mr Dimitris Kintsakis).
City Hall Nisporeni, Moldova, 18-19 September 2017 (Responsible person for organisation from the Municipality side Ms Olesea Sajin and Mr Valicov Mihail).
As project partners the municipalities announced these event and promoted their attendance by different city stakeholder groups.
All workshops attracted attention from different parties such as municipality and utility providers management and employees (energy, water, waste, telecommunication and public transportation companies, IT companies, the educational community and regional tourism boards).
The participants were presented with the overview of the Smart Urbana project objectives and its achievements and actively discussed the current problems that can be addressed with the digital transformation instruments for the cities providing their integrated holistic view as complex cyber-physical systems.
A mix of stakeholder groups and their interests made these workshops’ discussions broader and cover different relevant aspects, topics, problems and optional solutions.
Some representatives from different organisations contributed to the workshop by providing their presentations related to the workshops’ subject and objectives. The examples of such presentations included Orange as a project leader of Alba Iulia Smart City 2018; Portuguese Environment Agency reviewing the air quality monitoring in the Faro region; Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) about joint projects with the Municipality of Volvi; and others.
One common issue was highlighted by different participants during all the workshops: For successful digital transformations and holitic representation of the city as complex cyber-physical system all stockholders must be involved and open to sharing available data and data source presntee by the Smart City Monitor IoT technology platform.
The current state of the problem is far from desirable: Sharing data between the municipality and its utility and service providers are not common practice, the majority of municipalities do not have easy access to many data sources (e.g. sensors or meters or relevant databases). Implementation of practical solutions can met resistance due to data ownership issues even when there are clear legal terms for this sensitive issue.
The Workshop on 31.10.2017 in Vienna (learn more) also aimed to cover issues and problems that stand in the way of the digital transformation development in the European cities
