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Digital tools are reshaping emergency response in Lemgo, where a location tracking solution uses real-time maps of incidents and team positions to make coordination easier, more reliable, and transferable to other regions.

Key takeaways

• Start with real user needs: The project originated from an on-the-ground problem identified by local emergency teams.
• Keep it simple: Minimal, easy-to-use features ensure adoption by volunteer organizations with limited IT expertise.
• Collaboration is key: Success depended on cooperation between city administration, German Red Cross and local startups.
• Use open-source for scalability: Making the tool free and open enables replication and adaptation in other regions at low cost.
• Iterative testing matters: Real-life pilots (e.g. Christmas market) were essential for refinement and validation.
• Small improvements can save lives: Cutting 30 seconds from emergency response time demonstrated measurable and impactful success.

In Lemgo, Germany, digital innovation is changing how emergency services operate. A smart location tracking system now visualises incidents and team positions in real time, enabling faster, more reliable coordination. As Nicole Baeumer from the Smart City project digital.interkommunal Kalletal.Lemgo shares, what began as a simple, local idea has evolved into a scalable open-source solution that shows how digital tools can make a measurable difference – even in seconds.

Lemgo and its neighbouring municipality Kalletal in North Rhine-Westphalia are part of the German federal funding program Model Projects Smart Cities (MPSC), which runs from 2021 to 2027. Their overall Smart City strategy focuses on five main areas: health, data-infrastructure-innovation, food, campus-quarter-living, and environment. Within this framework, more than twenty subprojects have been developed, including Smarte Einsatzkrõfteortung - digital.interkommunal, aimed at improving public health and safety..

During major local events, the German Red Cross provides on-site medical services. Until recently, coordination between the control centre and first aid patrols relied on verbal radio messages – a process often slow and prone to error. On average, it took about forty seconds to dispatch a team, a delay that could be critical in emergencies.

To overcome this challenge, the Smart City Team, the German Red Cross, and the local startup Impact IT collaborated on a digital solution. The result is a web-based application that uses smartphones in medical backpacks equipped with the OwnTrack app for live location tracking. The control centre can see where patrols are in real time, upload custom maps such as Christmas market layouts, check device battery status, and mark key sites like hospitals or defibrillators. Simple and intuitive by design, the tool is easy to use even for volunteers with limited technical experience.

First tested during Lemgo’s annual “Kläschen” Christmas Market in 2023 and 2024, the system proved remarkably effective: average response times dropped from forty seconds to just ten. A thirty seconds improvement may seem small, but in an emergency, it can be life-saving. Encouraged by positive feedback, the team has since refined and expanded the system to other events and organisations.

Open by design, the solution is freely available on platforms such as OpenCode and GitLab, complete with installation guides, user manuals, and adaptation instructions. Its open-source model ensures transparency and makes replication in other cities straightforward and affordable.

This event is part of the ISCN Global Mixer, a series of events organized by the International Smart Cities Network. The presentations cover a wide range of topics related to international smart city approaches and provide exciting insights into urban digitalization worldwide - in just 30 minutes.

Year of publication: 2025

Democracy is under pressure, in municipalities and beyond. In this episode of the ISCN Global Mixer we want to look at the status quo of digital citizen participation in (smart) cities. Join us as we get a first-hand update from Decidim, one of the plattforms and communities with the biggest legacy creating multi-faceted digital participation and decisionmaking by, from and for the people.

Key takeaways

• Decidim is a modular, open-source platform that enables participatory processes such as budgeting, consultations, and collaborative policymaking.
• The platform’s hybrid participation model combines online and face-to-face engagement, strengthening inclusion and democratic legitimacy.
• Transparency, accountability, and openness are core principles that foster public trust and long-term sustainability.
• Governed through a public–commons partnership, Decidim demonstrates how digital infrastructures can be co-managed as shared public goods.
• Global communities continuously expand and localize the platform, ensuring cultural adaptability, interoperability, and future readiness.

Across the past decade, a “deliberative wave” – as described by the OECD – has swept through cities and institutions worldwide, driven by digital technologies and civic innovation. Yet in times of democratic fatigue and growing discontent, cities face the challenge of maintaining trust and engagement while navigating rapid digital transformation.

Nil Homedes Busquets, Director of Decidim, explored how the open-source digital platform, originally developed by the City of Barcelona, has evolved from a local civic project into a global infrastructure for participatory democracy. Nearly a decade after its creation, Decidim is now used by more than 450 organizations worldwide – from municipalities to cooperatives and civic movements – enabling citizens to collectively propose, debate, and decide on public policies within a transparent, inclusive, and democratic framework.

Its success lies in a modular architecture, structured around participatory spaces (where participation takes place, such as budgeting or consultations) and components (tools for proposals, meetings, surveys, or accountability). This modular building system lets institutions configure Decidim to their specific needs, ensuring flexibility and scalability.

The hybrid participation model bridges digital and in-person deliberation: citizens can attend meetings, submit proposals online, and track how decisions are implemented, making governance more inclusive and transparent. To build trust and security, Decidim integrates AI-assisted moderation, identity verification, and open APIs for connecting with other civic systems – even exploring links to urban digital twins for evidence-based policymaking.

Its governance structure stands out as a public-commons partnership. Maintained by the Decidim Association, an independent, community-led organization, the platform exemplifies how digital infrastructures can be jointly managed by governments and civil society as shared public goods – strengthening digital sovereignty and long-term sustainability.

Recent updates include informal participation features, co-authored proposals, and a read/write API, broadening functionality and inclusivity. Local communities worldwide – from Europe to Japan and Latin America – continue to adapt Decidim to their cultural and linguistic contexts, showing how open collaboration can scale globally without losing democratic integrity.

Decidim demonstrates that digital participation can remain citizen-owned, transparent, and trustworthy when technology is governed democratically. The platform embodies a new understanding of how digital infrastructures can serve the public good – not as tools of efficiency, but as enablers of collective intelligence, openness, and civic empowerment. By linking participation with innovation and accountability, Decidim offers a compelling vision of how cities can strengthen democracy and public trust in the digital age.

This event is part of the ISCN Global Mixer, a series of events organized by the International Smart Cities Network. The presentations cover a wide range of topics related to international smart city approaches and provide exciting insights into urban digitalization worldwide - in just 30 minutes.

Year of publication: 2024

In this episode of the ISCN Global Mixer, Serena Mombelli and Patricio Reyes from vCity, a platform led by the Data Analytics and Visualization Group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, shared insights on how data-driven analysis can support human-centred urban planning and policy-making. In this session they present a use case approximating in greater detail whether high-risk groups have adequate access to Barcelona's climate shelters during heatwaves.

Currently, vCity is looking for new cities to collaborate! 

If you are interested to implement a study or a use case in your municipality, feel free to reach out to vCity:

 hello@vcity-tech
www.vcity.tech

vCity works in the following areas:

• Proximity: Accessibility of facilities, for example Climate Shelters Barcelona study
• Air Quality: Democratizing the access to models for air quality forecasting (models are trained with the capabilities of the BSC, but can be used without supercomputers by cities)
• Cycling: Efficient planning and implementation of networks of bike lanes
• Mobility: Creating a multi modal model
• Sustainability: Developing indicatiors to measure the preparedness of cities for circular economy and green transition. 

The costs are covered by the current public funding of the vCity projects. Interested cities thus only need to share access to data sources and local knowledge for their use cases or studies, for example through urban planners, policy-makers or project managers, to benefit from a great cooperation and leverage expert knowledge and supercomputing resources!

Agreements can be formalized through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), if needed, with 2-3 months preparation time.

In this episode of the ISCN Global Mixer, Serena Mombelli and Patricio Reyes, researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) presented the project vCity, which provides Cities a human centric platform for urban data twins. 

The platform offers solutions for cities in different areas, and demonstrates the capabilities of digitalisation in cities. The projects so far works in the areas of proximity, air quality, cycling, mobility and sustainability.

The presentation focused on the analysis of Climate Shelter Accessibility in Barcelona, a result of a collaboration between Barcelona City Council and vCity. The study is one of the use cases in the Urban Lab for Proximity. 

Cities globally are increasingly affected by heatwaves, and many municipalities are seeking solutions to protect vulnerable groups. Barcelona has over 360 climate shelters in public spaces such as schools, libraries, and parks, providing protection during high temperatures

But do high-risk groups have adequate access to shelters during heat-waves? Serena Mombelli answered this question and gave many more valuable insights into the approach and methodology of the study in her presentation.  

For more information and an interactive map,  visit the project’s website. 

For any further questions, project ideas or matching requirements, feel also free to reach out to us, the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN), via iscn@giz.de 

In this edition of the Global Mixer of the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN), Lena Plikat and Julian Kath from the TUMI project (Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative) showcased the TUMI Mobility Data Hub a platform to which municipalities the world over can link themselves to facilitate common-good oriented analysis of mobility globally.

Key takeaways

• Big Data, big gaps: Data is being amassed by many and yet it is not distributed evenly and optimally allocated for public use.
• The flexibility of Data Hubs: TUMI's ckan-based Data Hub is adjustable to various needs and capacities of municipalities with varying degrees of involvement required.
• Setting the ground and seeds, harvesting KPIs: With a data hub as a ground base, analysis and cross-comparibility on characteristics of urban mobility become possible. KPIs can be visualized and feedback into databases. Joint work can more accurately inform the road to globally sustainable mobility.

Mobility and construction are the fundamental phenomena giving cities their physical shape. Since mobility requires more frequent spatial orientation - a car, tram, bicycle needs to arrive to the endpoint of its trip - it lends itself more readily to data accumulation. And yet, as the speakers of this ISCN Global Mixer made clear, even for mobility data large data gaps prevail. According to the Worldbank report Sustainable Mobility: Policy Making for Data Sharing (2021), quoted by our speakers, still

35% of the world’s largest cities and 92% of the largest low and middle-income cities do not have complete transportation maps.

TUMI - the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative - formed by an alliance of 11 renowned international organizations (C40, ADB, CAF, BMZ, GIZ, ICLEI, ITDP, KFW, SLOCAT, UN-Habitat, World Resources Institute) is set to change this throug various projects and activities. In our ISCN Global Mixer event they focussed their presentation on their Mobility Data Hub. 

As a ckan-based one-stop platform, it makes urban mobility data accessible in an integrated manner and - depending on the database linked - allows for instant visualizations and aggregations of mobility KPIs throug its' analyzer. 

After an initial overview on the project by Lena Plikat, Julian Kath explained the approach of the Mobility Data Hub more specifically including examples from Yaoundé in Cameroun and Managua, Nicaragua. Yaoundé launched its first data hub recently together with TUMI to back a data-driven transformation of its' mobility and transport system. Managua served as an illustrative example in the presentation of the capabilities of the analyzer as we were shown visualizations of core KPIs for public transport in the city on e.g. coverage, temporal exits, waiting times, etc., all based on GTFS data. Enjoy the recording (20min) of the session above for all details!

And if you, too, want to onramp your municipality to the mobility data hub of TUMI for free, thereby co-developing an open data portal for your urban mobility, this is your opportunity! Join us in advancing the ways communities the world over visualize, analyze and link their data for global sustainability efforts. You can reach out to TUMI directly or via us, the ISCN, at iscn@giz.de.

Website of TUMI: https://transformative-mobility.org/ 

TUMI's Mobility Data Hub: https://hub.tumidata.org/ 

Quoted Worldbank report: Sustainable Mobility for All. 2021. Sustainable Mobility: Policy Making for Data Sharing. Washington DC.