management & control tools

Year of publication: 2023

In this short keynote, Dr. Kanop Ketchart, Mayor from Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand, describes how the city set up low-cost tech infrastructure and a crowdsourcing workflow to significantly reduce damages from flooding and enhance the trust level and resilience in the community.

The keynote was part of ISCN's International Smart City Symposium 2023.

How to make the comprehensive experiences in smart city development tangible and portable so that others can take them up easily?
In this ISCN Global Mixer, Dr Beate Ginzel and Elisabeth Breitenstein from Leipzig present their Digital Playbook as a living document and invite all of us to be “copycats” in using and remixing the playbook and feeding back into future drafts!

Key takeaways

• Wikis, codebases - and playbooks! Knowledge from Smart Cities can be shared in many different ways. Playbooks are a format that invites dynamic collaboration and captures many social dimensions of developments next to technical aspects.
• Your team will go through stages: Likely any municipal team occupied with Smart City development will go through different stages. The model of psychological researcher Bruce Tuckman suggests the stages of "forming, storming, norming and performing".
• Straightforward writing and genuine reflection: The core "technique" of playbooks remains writing. A down-to-earth way of formulating and reiterating the question about the necessity of each text helps in making the document indeed interactive and vivid.
• Copycats never arrive at an endpoint: Leipzig openly invites all readers of the playbook to be "copycats", to engage with the material, to remix it, to add discussion points, etc. It's a living document acknowledging that meaningful digitalization has never an ending point but is a constant collaborative journey.

As sort of a present to their 5^th anniversary, the Digital City Unit of Leipzig has drafted and published the first version of their Digital City Playbook. And as with many developments and “presents” in smart cities, it has the great characteristic of being non-rivalrous, i.e. it’s not depleted when used but, quite the opposite, even enhanced when shared and modified!

But what is the playbook exactly? It’s an open narration of the comprehensive activities and approaches undertaken by Leipzig for their smart city development with the expressive intention and expectation for the texts and descriptions to be copied, experimented with, adjusted, and reflected on. The playbook's approach to knowledge transfer is thus dynamic and open to change, similar to an open source code platform or a wiki. Reading it, one gets an interesting and indeed vivid impression of Leipzig’s smart city journey. 

The playbook is structured along Tuckman’s stages of group development (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing) which many other municipal teams working on smart cities can e expected to go through as well. It captures the early phases of setting up and structuring teams and strategies for Leipzig and the Digital City Unit up to the current stages of project implementations and reflections thereupon. 

It also features many projects and smart city measures in Leipzig, such as Connected Urban Twins (CUT), sustainable energy positive & zero carbon communities (SPARCS), the ID management system of ID Ideal or the Leipzig City App. 

In a refreshing manner, many of these measures are introduced very straightforwardly, e.g. when giving a breakdown of “Where [and how] Leipzig begins with energetic district concepts” (p. 52ff.) or with the decision tree on establishing a city app (p. 22) with hands-on formulations (“We want to develop a city app!” – “Absolutely”/”At the moment rather not”), thereby showing the interactive potential of such texts.

Screenshot from the Digital Playbook of the city of Leipzig

But see for yourself! 
You can either watch the recording of this ISCN Global Mixer above or dive straight into the playbook itself.
(Currently the published version is only in German, but we will update here as soon as an English version is available.)

And check out these other examples of playbooks: 

Playbook Public Service Design by the City Lab Berlin

The Boston Smart City Playbook

UN-Habitat's People-centered Smart Cities Playbooks

Year of publication: 2024

Cities and forests are related to each other and the provision of resources and protection is mutual: This edition of the ISCN Global Mixer looks at a solution to achieve ultra-early detection of wildfires through extended IOT-sensoring.

Forests are under tremendous distress. In Germany, only every fifth tree in forests is still healthy. The past years have seen many heat records and several big and escalating wildfires which are only adding to the menace. As many urban areas around the world are in fact surrounded by forestry and enjoy the resources, protection and other multiple benefits it provides, the smart-city-approach has to investigate how to extend and use its capacities for forest protection as well.

In this ISCN Global Mixer, Pedro Silva, Chief Technical Officer of Dryad Networks demonstrated how extended IOT-sensoring on trees can achieve an ultra-early detection of wildfires. 

He presented various options for detecting forest fires, such as camera- and satellite-based solutions. Dryad has developed another solution: ultra-early detection with gas sensors. These sensors are solar-powered and can detect wildfires in the smoldering phase when no fire has broken out yet. In principle, it is important to detect forest fires within the first 60 minutes and take action to prevent serious damage. The sensors detect the "smell" of a composition of different gases that is typical of forest fires. When detected, messages are sent via the gateways to the monitoring system, which in turn notifies the fire departments.  

Dryad developed the mesh network based on LoRaWAN technology to provide the best possible coverage of large and remote areas. Pedro emphasized that IoT networks in forests can be used for more than just detecting forest fires. Once installed, the system can be used for various use cases from monitoring the health of trees to detecting illegal activities in the forest, such as logging.