Students from eight universities tackle the ISCN University Challenge 2025 on reusing data

Bringing young bright minds closer to the development of common good-oriented smart cities – that’s why the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN) has set up its “University Challenges”. Each year it sources from its network a concrete and practical smart city challenge. Students from around the world then tackle these challenges in short sprints of about half a day and benefit from applying the theoretical knowledge of their various disciplinary backgrounds to the practical realities of cities and communities. Public sector officials on the other hand gain a fresh batch of literal “out-of-the-box” perspectives – and the ISCN team supports in bridging the gap between external creativity and operational realities for implementation.

Toward the end of 2025, the ISCN university challenge was about reuse of citizen-generated data. The starting point were non-emergency citizen reporting tools like “Mängelmelder” (Germany), Fixmystreet (UK) and PorMiBarrio (Uruguay) which are already a decade-old basic tool in smart city development. Citizens can set a pin on a digital map and raise issues or observations which are then processed by the city administration. With the advent of more powerful urban data platforms, elaborated data governances and new algorithms, there is now a lot more potential for reusing such citizen-generated data for new insights and policies.

Instead of driving the glut for ever more and new data, we asked in our challenge students from eight universities around the world: What additional questions could be answered with the reuse of data from citizen reporting tools [other than the literal problems reported by users]?

What additional questions could be answered with the reuse of data from citizen reporting tools?

Screenshot of the tool "EMSOS", where citizens can set pins on a map of Osnabrück to report issues or observations (https://emsos.osnabrueck.de/)

Image of the online virtual conference between ISCN staff and students of universidad de cuenca to present their solutions for the iscn university challenge 2025 — GIZ

After an introduction and context-setting by ISCN staff and a presentation by the city of Osnabrück, which as a German model project smart city (MPSC) provided a concrete reference for this year’s challenge, students scrummed together to conceptualize two or three ideas for data reuse, analyze the stakeholder environment for their ideas and think about novel policy implications that could stem from their ideas.

In total, this yielded more than 40 creative ideas for reusing citizen-generated data from online reporting tools in new ways, which will be summarized and consolidated by ISCN for actionable next steps first to Osnabrück but then also for the rest of its network. Moreover, there will be a virtual follow-up meeting where groups from each university present their results to officials and smart city experts and can thereby receive valuable feedback as well as insights into how their peers from other corners of the world would approach such a challenge.

The format is agile, open and inspiring and as such one of the beacons in the ISCN activities for knowledge transfer and practice exchange for common-good oriented smart cities across countries, stakeholders and age groups!

Group of students from HTW Berlin, Hochschule Heilbronn and Universitat Abat Oliba, Barcelona Kalil Afan

Group of students at Toronto Metropolitan University participating at ISCN challenge 2025 Pamela Robinson

Pamela Robinson

Group of students from Ostfalia university participating at ISCN challenge 2025 Jan Büchsenschuß

Students of Erasmus University Rotterdam participating in ISCN challenge 2025 GIZ

Students of Twente University participating in ISCN challenge 2025 Mila Koeva

GIZ

Testimonials

"In my role as research coordinator and on behalf of the Master's Program in Sustainable Cities at Universidad de Cuenca, I would like to restate our sincere thanks to GIZ and everyone involved, these kind of events are great for us to expose students to real-world international challenges, generate networks, and as an internationalization initiative." – Ing. Francisco Calderón Peralvo, PhD, MEng CEM

"The university challenge is a great opportunity for students to realise that data and data collection are not ends in themselves. Data collection must always serve a useful purpose in a smart city. Every data set has one or more uses, but not every use represents added value. That is why creativity is needed to develop meaningful use cases." – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jan Büchsenschuß, Head of Study Programme Smart City Engineering, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences

"Students need to learn about technological instruments, which constantly change and improve; but they also need to be aware about societal issues […] This is a nice possibility to put all of this together: How Data can be used to the Public good"

– Prof. Dr. Florian Koch, HTW Berlin - University of Applied Sciences

Are you interested in joining the next edition as a city with your practical challenge or with your student course to throw yourself at a practical issue? Don’t hesitate to contact us via iscn@giz.de

Students from eight universities tackle the ISCN University Challenge 2025 on reusing data

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What additional questions could be answered with the reuse of data from citizen reporting tools?

Testimonials

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