NiCE Toolkit Homepage

València offers, in real time, data of air quality, car parks, bicycles and buses in a public portal with citizen dashboards

Preview of València “Al Minut” dashboard

València al Minut

The new municipal portal “València in real time” (“València al Minut” the original name in Valencian) offers citizens and public servants real-time traffic information, car and bicycle parking places, bicycle lane, EMT bus network, meteorology, air pollution, road works and even , unemployment data.

Councilor for Electronic Administration, Pere Fuset, has said that it is “a commitment of the City Council for transparency and the best tool to bring services to the citizen”;  and explained that it also offers news, cultural agenda and the different municipal social networks.

The website, available in Valencian and Spanish, presents “relevant and most interesting” indicators for citizens in the areas of sustainable mobility, social welfare, environmental sustainability and governance, including maps with different layers that allow access to this information in a geolocalized way.

This way it is possible for citizens to consult which bus stop is the closest and how long it will take the next bus to arrive, the free places of a public car park – soon to be included the private ones -, free Wifi access points, the public bicycle anchorages, the monthly unemployment data, thermal sensation or airborne particles.

València Smart City

Fuset has assured that this is a “first step” included in the strategy “València Valencia Smart City” which objective is to “provide citizens with more information on municipal services in real time and that will be permanently available.”

During the presentation of the platform www.valencia.es/valenciaalminut, the technicians who have developed it have shown that this tool places València “at the level of big smart cities with citizen dashboards” and have indicated that “it will grow as there is more information”.

Preview of València’ Geoportal

This information is also shown outside the maps, and is supplemented with socio-economic information on data and unemployment rate, news, cultural agenda and social network accounts, as well as having a link to the “open government” portal and the World Council on City Data website (www.dataforcities.org), to compare information with other cities.

According to Fuset, the portal is “very thought to be used with the mobile” and will go “enriching with more information” that they consider of relevance.

Besides, the municipal “Geoportal” (geoportal.valencia.es) has been presented: “a much more ambitious project to map all the city information order by neighborhoods and districts, for citizens and municipal employees”.

Learn more about València’s smart city approach by visiting its profile page

Pages 21-22-23 and 46 of our GDC 2016 collection of case-studies (http://bit.ly/GDC–case-studies-2016).

With the building of a new university campus (Tampere3), students will increasingly need to move between the campuses. In most cases, students commute using public transportation, but also walking or by bike or by car.

To answer this mobility challenge, SCIL (the Smart Campus Innovation Lab, a “living lab” and open-source development community gathering students, IT and university professionals) organises a Challenge to develop an application that can ease the life of Tampere3 students, thanks to open data and public transport data made available online.

Curious to learn more about this initiative : Visit MINDTREK website here.

‘Smart Education’ and ‘Smart Mobility’ are two pillars of Tampere’s approach to smart city.

Read more on Tampere profile page.

This article was originally published on the Raconteur.net website

Daniël Termont is the mayor of Ghent and EUROCITIES president.

Daniël Termont, Mayor of Ghent and EUROCITIES’ rotating president

“In Ghent, we combine our historical façades with a forward- looking vision. By 2020, I want my city to be open, inclusive, smart and child friendly. Key to this vision are our citizens – we want to build the Ghent of the future together.

Discussions around smart cities are too often driven by technology and industry. I believe cities, and their citizens, are at the core of the smart city transition. Technology is an important ingredient of course: we are looking to innovative solutions to manage our energy and transport systems better, manage, process and visualise data, and make life easier for all.

But we’re not overlooking the low-tech solutions that complement these: well-organised bike paths, for example, and vertical farming.

Technology for us is a means not an end and becoming smarter is about a whole lot more.

We need to find new ways of working together so we can make the most of everyone’s expertise. Public administrations, citizens, businesses and research institutes: we are all part of the same urban ecosystem and we all have something to offer. By pooling our resources, we can create better solutions that truly address our challenges and are owned by the entire city.

In Ghent, we have several tools to make this happen, such as the Ghent Climate Alliance, which is behind our vision of becoming climate neutral. Our Ghent Living Lab is an innovative platform where citizens, developers, researchers and businesses can co-create their city.

Smart cities rely on data, so opening up data is an important initiative for Ghent. Students and developers can use it to work on new solutions, including apps that make life easier for residents, such as a waste collection calendar and an app, ‘Parkmobile‘, to locate available parking spaces in real time.

We’ve even turned it into a competition: our annual hackathon, Apps for Ghent, invites developers to turn our open data into exciting new apps, such as Studio Dott’s PopBike (video), which enables users to calculate the best bike route and share bikes, and Ghendetta, a game that encourages users to explore city districts.

One of the challenges many cities face with opening data is protecting privacy. Citizens need to be able to access, use and manage their data, and for this they need adequate digital skills. This is a priority for Ghent as we want to make sure technology is accessible to everyone.

It is essential then that we create a level playing field. We need common and open standards and better interoperability between systems. This would open the market to more actors and would also bring down costs, and maximise the release, accessibility and usability of data, helping businesses grow.

Working together on projects is a must for testing and scaling up new solutions. Ghent is involved in several, including the Green Digital Charter, through which we commit to reducing our carbon footprint with smart ICT. We also need direct dialogue with European Union decision-makers.

With the Urban Agenda for the EU and the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities, we see new work processes that support the joining up of different levels of government and different sectors. This is a step in the right direction to address European and urban challenges together.

I am looking forward to the journey ahead and I am pleased to be sharing it with my colleagues at EUROCITIES, the network of major European cities. This is where I can bounce off ideas, discover new solutions and find ways to address shared challenges.

As a mayor, I know every corner of my city and have daily contact with citizens. This knowledge is crucial for making smart city solutions work. Working with cities means working with citizens, so by strengthening the links between EU institutions and cities, we are building a stronger Europe.

 

During a Eurocities Knowledge Society Forum event, 17-19 June 2013 in Oulu, Finland, Dave Carter from Manchester Digital Development Agency presented the Green Digital Toolkit to the delegates.

Most cities there are already signatories (about 8/9 of 10/12) so all promised to do something but nothing immediate.  After the summer break, Dave will email them and remind them of their agreement to share tool and activity data in Oulu.  He suggests supporting them closely to do this, even offering to ‘hand-hold them’ through the process.

Currently the tool section of the toolkit is quite bare – there are ideas for potential tools but not links to the tools themselves.  When adding content, city representatives were very comfortable with sharing activity details – they could and did write this content in immediately without needing to check with anyone else.

The problem with sharing tools themselves (a link/a download) is that permission is needed and often the person who has the authority to agree to the sharing of a tool is an unknown.  Since many cities are not in the habit of sharing with other cities, there is no process or procedure for approving the sharing itself.  When faced with that kind of uncertainty and without any pressure to share coming from one’s line manager, the easiest response is to just not act.

So how to make it easier to share tools than not share tools.  This is a tricky challenge.  One tried and test approach is persistent support!  If the NiCE team persist and offer support to city representatives in sharing tool details, then the more proactive cities will start to share.  Once a few put details online, others will follow because they see the benefit and want to be part of the sharing community.

Manchester and Linkoping have both shared tangible, downloadable tools already.  Manchester has shared details of a open source method for viewing low carbon projects on a Google Map.  Linkoping have shared a timeline which shows their city’s journey into one of the world’s leading green digital cities.

Our next step, therefore, should be to go back to all those cities who have listed their ideas for tools already in the toolkit and ask them to provide more concrete information.   During our site visit to Warsaw, we also came across almost 2 dozen tool ideas – we have asked Warsaw a couple of time to provide more details of these and will ‘handhold’ if necessary to get them uploaded.  The next 6 months of this project will be very focused on this activity.

Interesting chats recently with people on 2 other EC projects – Smart Cities Stakeholder Platform (http://www.eu-smartcities.eu/) and GreenITNet (http://www.greenitnet.org/).

Public service information is the single largest source of information in Europe. Public authorities produce large amounts of official data that can provide a basis for new, innovative services and applications. This data, according to the European Commission, has an estimated market value of about €40 billion.

Can the opening of this huge amount of data foster the creation of tools and solutions that will turn European cities more “smart”?

We hope that cities will take advantage of the GDC platform and share ideas, tools and activities that can make the difference!

During the NiCE project, we have had several very successful site visits to cities such as Manchester, Linkoping, Eindhoven and Warsaw.   Now at this stage of the project, we are thinking about how to make best use of the remaining site visits.

We showed the draft visualisation aspect of the ICT carbon footprint tool to a city yesterday and it was very well received.  Now it is possible for cities to see their percentage reduction from one date to the next.  This is an essential part of the Charter.

The city also observed on the use of spreadsheets to capture ICT carbon footprint data.  Remembering another city rep told the
participants that the ICT carbon footprint spreadsheet we had provided was ‘excellent’.  Similarly, this city rep indicated that a spreadsheet is very useful as it can be manipulated with their own data and calculations and then ‘cleaned up’ for the visualization.

After clear feedback for the signatory cities, the template that will be used for reporting the Green Digital Charter activities (projects) is being developed in a way that matches the template that will be used for the Covenant of Mayors reporting.

During the last year NiCE project has been in a constant communication with the CoM Office in an attempt to build a reporting template that will follow the one that will be used after 2014 for the Covenant of Mayors. This way, cities will need to work for reporting their activities/projects in one of the initiatives and just copy & paste to report for the other.

How can we ensure that the many different city initiatives relating to Green Digital Cities , Smart Cities , Sustainable Cities , Future Cities , share information and collaborate rather than becoming competitive and protective

According to the work under way, the Action Framework of the Green Digital Charter will be an integral part of the Toolkit mechanics.

Using the classification system of the Action Framework, cities will be able to identify areas, types & roles of ICT activity in which they need to put more effort in the way to becoming Smart Cities.

Linkoping told us today that the scope of the project when measuring the carbon footprint must be an essential part of the ICT carbon footprint tool

In Manchester yesterday, I provided a demonstration of the NiCE Green Digital Toolkit to a room full of people interested in green IT, as part of the Manchester Corridor knowledge exchange initiative, Corridor Connections.  There were ICT representatives from the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, SUSTIT (a university initiative to measure carbon across many campuses), from Manchester City Council and also from the carbon literacy network.

I’m pleased to report that an ICT representative from Manchester City Council described our ICT Carbon Footprint tool as ‘brilliant’.  They found it really helpful it tracking their ICT carbon footprint

Indeed there was generally a really good response from people about the toolkit, these were some highlights

• it is nice to be able to look at what options are available without feeling under pressure to buy a product
• it is good to see what other cities are using
• it can help answer questions we don’t know the answer to (googling does not provide specific enough answers)
• we have tools and case studies of our own that we could share

The points to take away as feedback are as follows:

– people had green digital strategies to share but thought it ‘might become a bit repetitive to see lots of strategies up there’

– the toolkit seems dominated by tools relating to greening IT itself.  It would be good to get a clearer idea about how IT can be used to support green initiatives as well – possibly as a separate category to filter on

We are still working well with Linkoping to develop ICT carbon footprint tool.

Linkoping have even produced an open source tool especially for the project!  It is called ‘EasyArp’ and is a very neat piece of software which captures data from an existing IP network messaging process to find out the ‘uptime’ of each ICT item using DNS records.  They have agreed to share this tool with everyone..

Our next step is to develop a user friendly visual interface for people to capture the data and provide some visual analysis so they can  assess their progress.

Clicks and Links and the city of Linkoping have been working hard on piloting the first version of the NiCE ICT Carbon Measurement tool.  This version is simply a process to follow and a spreadsheet to fill in.  Since city administrators are busy, a spreadsheet seemed like the most straightforward approach.

The first step was to find out how many pieces of ICT equipment were in use in Linkoping.  This was quite straightforward as Linkoping have a comprehensive asset register and could identify all their equipment immediately by referring to their CMD database.  The next 2 steps, to find out how long the equipment was on for and how much energy they use has taken much longer.  Firstly there was a bug in Linkoping’s network system managed Symantec which prevented identification of all ICT equipment connected and online.  Luckily Symantec have agreed to fix this bug and will deliver on this at the end of April, hopefully to the benefit of all their clients.  Another tool, EnviroProt can also provide information about the ICT equipment connected to a network at any one time.  However, another possibility is to use ARP tables to identify data exchanges between pieces of equipment.

Then, we found that information about the amount of energy used by different types of ICT equipment is not easily available.  There is no online register which brings all energy consumption data together.  Some ICT companies, such as HP, make the energy data available through their ‘quick specs’ but this is on a model by model basis – a time-consuming effort for an IT manager.  Linkoping use 800 different models of printer so finding energy data for each one is a mammoth task.  Instead, we are using a ‘typical’ energy use measurement for each category of ICT equipment (e.g. standard PC, portable PC, laser printer etc).  Another concern is that the energy data provided by the ICT companies is not necessarily reliable (energy usage of PCs has apparently dropped from 445 watts to 65 watts in just 5 years).

Jonas Wilman at Linkoping has now completed a ‘quick and dirty’ version of the spreadsheet to get an initial impression of the carbon footprint of Linkoping.  He estimated the time usage by using a 7 hour per day x 226 days per working year and multiplying it by the number of PCs, laptops, iPads etc out of the asset register.  This produced an estimated 13,786 hours of energy usage by 12,617 pieces of ICT equipment in 1 year by the city administration of Linkoping (not including the data centre).

The next steps are

• to find out just how accurate the industry estimations of the ICT energy consumption actually is – by using special plugs which measure wattage directly from the piece of equipment itself.
• to improve measurement of ‘time in use’ of ICT equipment by using software rather than estimating hours.  Linkoping are producing a shareable tool that captures and analyses data from the ARP tables
• to categorise users in such a way that actions aimed at reducing emissions are traceable in the measurements
• to think about how to better present both the capturing of the data and the visualisation of results for different audiences

It is hoped that by 1st June, Linkoping will have a figure which they can fix as their GDC ICT carbon reduction benchmark.  This measurement will then be the target for reduction of 30% over the next 5 years, according to the related Charter commitment.

In ‘Review my city’s progress’, cities can answer questions to assess their status on green and digital activities.  These are activities which are EITHER making ICT more green OR using ICT to be more green (where ‘green’ is environmental/sustainability related).

According to the cities at the training session in January 2013, this tool has great potential.  One of the biggest questions cities are asking themselves, is ‘how well are we doing?’  A set of self assessment questions which can be answered over a period of time is very useful in tracking progress, particularly when city admins have a high turnover of staff.

Agreed changes to this tool at the city training therefore were

• to create individual (personal) logins rather than city logins, so people can track who has answered which question.
• provide a chronology of answers
• to reduce the number of questions (23 seems overwhelming) or at least to group them

Any other comments?

On 28th January, Clicks & Links, IOER and EUROCITIES ran a combined training session for cities interested in using the Green Digital Toolkit.

EUROCITIES described how the toolkit is designed to help cities implement the Green Digital Charter.

Clicks & Links asked the cities to identify ‘green digital’ activities.  These are activities within their cities which EITHER use ICT to deliver green/environmental initiatives OR are focused on making ICT itself more green.  The city representatives all had 2-3 activities that were relevant and posted these activities onto the toolkit.  Signatory cities of the Green Digital Charter were pleased to see their activities immediately go ‘live’ on the website.

The cities were also encouraged to share details of tools related to their activities.  ‘Tools’ are reusable pieces of information, that could be applied in another city such as methodologies, software, business cases, feasibility studies.  Identifying tools was much harder for the cities – they are used to sharing best practice but they are not used to thinking about what documents, data or processes they could share.