ISCN Online Advisory Programme #16: Communicating "Smart City" to Citizens

"Smart City" as a concept has a legacy of several decades by now. Still many people associate it with technology-driven approaches with intransparent and diffuse effects, not resting on a sufficiently stable ground of trust. 
On the other hand, more and more countries and municipalities the world over are pursuing common good-oriented smart city measures - far from the commercial-only applications - that aim at embedding the growing technical possibilities more holistically into the cityscape. This is also the case, for example, with the German funding programme for Model Projects Smart City (MPSC).

But how to better communicate this perspective of Smart City as public good and people-centered? How can people gain trust in the efforts and feel invited to shape the digital development of their cities and communities? 

In this Online Advisory Programme (OAP) of the International Smart Cities Netzwork (ISCN), guests from Toronto, Porto and Regensburg addressed these questions. 

Jackie Lu from Helpful Places in Canada presented the Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR) standard, a visual framework for communicating smart city technology in public space, and which was collaboratively developed with experts and citizens. With the tangible comparison to nutrition and food labels, Jackie showed how they bundle together in a transparent and intelligible taxonomy much information from the purpose of the employed technology to the technology type, the data process, the data types collected as well as access and storage categories. In sum, according to Jackie

 

“[DTPR] helps you closing the gap between your technology Governance Practices and the public understanding of those practices.”

This was so convincing an approach that a participant already during the event checked the DTPR material in parallel in the browser and forked it for their own LoRaWan project in Germany. Most probably this was the fastest solution transfer in the history of the ISCN’s Online Advisory Programme!..  

The following is a recording of her keynote.
 

Joana Silva from Porto Digital subsequently presented DTPR “in context”, i.e. how it was implemented at pilot sites in Portugal’s second biggest city. At the beginning of the project cycle was a pre-survey of citizens on what matters to them when it comes to informing about technology. More than 70% affirmed that they want installed technologies to be signposted in public space. Interestingly, this wish came less from privacy concerns but rather from the proactive demand for understanding benefits and challenges of the technology and the right to information as well as the interest in raising the awareness about it. 

In the ex-post analysis, they found that a significant number of citizens interacted with the presented signposts and spent on average 2.5 minutes on each accessed platform page – which is quite an encouraging figure as it is substantially higher than the average of less than a minute spent on websites in general across all industries. 

In sum, Porto Digital confirmed a strong alignment between citizens demands and what their version of DTPR delivers, so that they want to develop the testing projects into more permanent signposting.

The following is a recording of the keynote from Joana, Porto Digital:

 

Last but not least, Katja Punk from the city of Regensburg gave a broader overview on the various communication tools she and her team employed to make their smart city strategy and measures more tangible.
From the get go she highlighted how communication and participation are strongly intertwined in Regensburg. One goes rarely without the other.
 

As an introductory analysis, Katja observed that many actors in the smart city space portray smart cities through means rather than solutions and results. But it’s mostly only the latter that is of interest to citizens and communication should be adjusted accordingly. 
At the same time there are challenges for smart city communication. The concept is still for many a novel one, the addressees are very diverse, many measures are still in implementation phase and not completed, and inherently many digital solutions don’t have the same visibility potential like physical construction projects, for example.

To meet the diversity of target groups, Regensburg varied it’s communication methods in inviting children to build smart city solutions with Lego, but offering prototyping platforms, events or guided tours for adult groups. As a complementary to the visual communication put forward by the previous speakers, Katja described how they sometimes intentionally used signage that is very short on the first level. By just showing the picture of a sensor on a signage and a quick appeal (“Look up!”) and not much more, they provoked interaction and curiosity on behalf of citizens who could then follow QR codes for more detailed info. 

The following is a recording of Katja and the city of Regenburg's recording.

The Q&A and discussion round was bundled together for after the keynotes. True to the main theme of the whole event there was very lively engagement. First questions revolved around lacks and opportunities in involving university environments and youth more strongly into smart city communication. All three speakers shared some examples of how their cities try to address these very points through joint projects with courses, living labs or other events. The ISCN could reference also one of its past OAP’s ("Smart Cities and Universities") that adressed this very question. 
Further, Jackie Lu was invited to go a bit further into discussing the current scaling potentials of an approach like DTPR. While several cities are still in the validation phase like Porto, some have already incorporated DTPR more comprehensively in their technology delivery processes. They are requiring, for example, vendors to report the data for the DTPR framework during the procurement process, or the framework is becoming part of workflow management and review processes of administrations. Moreover, some private companies are already proactively seeking out DTPR as a model to specify their IoT products. A multi-stakeholder ecosystem of practice is already emerging, indeed fostered by the open sourcing of the framework. 

Let’s continue the vivid exchange and communication around smart cities through many channels! We continuously strive for the ISCN being one of them and invite any contacts, requests and ideas via iscn@giz.de !