A Tale of Open Data Innovations

in Five Smart Cities

Adegboyega Ojo, Edward Curry, Fatemeh Ahmadi-Zeleti

Insight Centre for Data Analytics

National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Rep. of Ireland

{adegboyega.ojo, ed.curry, fatemeh.ahmadizeleti}@insight-centre.org

2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

5 - 8, January, 2015, Grand Hyatt, Kauai

Background: City - Data Convergence

o Open data central to open innovations in cities

o Open data is powering a new civic movement that is changing the way citizens

experience cities (http://www.data.gov/cities/)

http://www.dublindashboard.ie/pages/index http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/detail/id/

68/slug/smart-citysdk

Background - Waves of Open Data

Innovation Approach

Networks of Civic

Innovation Offices

Need-driven

Programs

Hack Events

“Direct” engagement of residents, city managers, other stakeholders

Freedom for bottom up innovation, techno-centric with “token”-level

participation of city management and residents

+t

Wave 1 Exemplar – Dutch Open

Hackathon

Available datasets including airport shuttle bus events, job

data, flight data, supermarket, order etc.

http://www.dutchopen

hackathon.com

Wave 2 Exemplar –

Summer of Smart in San Francisco

Engage mayoral candidates in

San Francisco (2011) on

solutions by Hack Teams to

pressing problems in areas

including 1) Community

Development, 2) Buildings.

Transportation and

Sustainability, 3) Public

Health, Food and Nutrition

Focus is on real needs and

involvement of major

stakeholders in solutions

Source: http://www.summerofsmart.org/home/

Wave 3 Example :

New Urban Mechanics

Boston

UtahPhilly

A Network of civic innovation

offices in Boston, Philadelphia

and Utah.

Each of the innovation offices

serve as the in-house research

and development group for the

respective mayors.

They build partnerships between

internal agencies and outside

entrepreneurs to pilot projects

that address the needs of

residents http://newurbanmechanics.org

The Challenge

o Bottom up open innovation activities generate relatively low number of commercially viable and sustainable solution

o How to scale Civic city innovation initiatives like Code for America, Code for Europe etc.

o How to continue to pursue “out of the box” bottom up innovation while directly addressing concrete need of city residents?

o There are yet no codified patterns of good practices with respect of open Innovations in Smart Cities.

o Poor understanding of how open data programs are shaped by the smart city context and the kinds of innovations enabled by open data in cities.

[Source: Townsend 2013]

Research Questions - 1

1) How does open data

program impact the smart

city context?

2) How does the smart city

program shape its

associated open data

initiatives?

Research Questions 2

Q1. How open data initiatives impacts smart city program

a) What smart city domains are impacted by open data initiatives?

b) What kinds of open engagement (including governance activities)

are enabled by open data in the associated smart city?

Q2. How smart city program shapes open data initiatives?

a) What datasets are available in the open data ecosystem?

b) What additional actors are engaged in in the open data ecosystem?

Approach 1 – “SCID” as underlying

conceptual FrameworkSCID Framework:

A Smart City Initiative

Development Framework

developed from the

studies of smart city

programs in 10 countries.

Links Smart City

initiatives to concrete

city domains and

associated stakeholders

A. Ojo, E. Curry, T. Janowski, Designing Next Generation Smart City

initiatives, ECIS 2014, Isreal

Approach 2 - Method

o Data sources – secondary, captured from information available

online about the smart city programs of selected cities

o Analysis – qualitative, using content analysis approach, codes for

initiatives, impact types, stakeholders, etc. Coding categories are

derived directly from the text data

o Case selection – 3 criteria used to select the cases

1) It must have a well-developed smart city program

2) The city strongly promotes OD initiatives as SCs initiatives

3) Availability of significant information on OD initiatives

Carried out between Feb – May 2014, 18 initiatives selected after

careful analysis of initiatives

Approach 3 – City Cases

The five cities selected include: Chicago (US-3), Helsinki (Finland-5),

Amsterdam (Netherlands-4), Barcelona (Spain-2) and Manchester (UK-4)

Results - Impact (Q1)

Governance and Economic Domains standout …

Results - Impact (Q1)

Domain Impact Patterns

Economy Creation of marketplace for society

relevant applications;

Availability of data products and

services based on city operational

data and;

Scaling up the adoption of open

data innovations across city

functions through tools provision.

Education Availability of innovative digital

services for the education domain.

Energy Availability of innovative digital

services for the education domain.

Environment Greener environment.

Governance Better information sharing; open

innovation for co-created services;

open engagement in policy and

decision making; and interoperation

within city-network.

Tourism Co-created services based on

available open data.

Transportation Better City Park Management; and

Shorter transit time for commuters.

Results – Governance Mechanisms (Q1)

Five governance mechanisms are discernible from initiatives:

1) Collaboration – enabling collaboration between city and stakeholders

2) Participation – enabling participation of residents and developers

3) Communication – enable better policy outcomes through publication of

relevant data

4) Data exchange – Enabling data sharing among city authorities and

network of cities

5) Service and application integration – to provide software development

tools (e.g. CitySDK) to build OD-based applications

Results – Data Ecosystem (Q2)

Specific datasets that are associated with major SCs domains –

number of datasets include in the ff sectors:

1) Transport and Mobility – OpenStreetMapdata, CurrentCarParks…

2) Health and wellbeing – UKFoodHygiene, DrugTreatmentStatistics…

3) Environment and safety – FloodMap, EnergyUsage…

4) Education – CookCOunty, AdultEducation…

5) Tourism – Cultural and Leisure…

“Our findings on the published datasets across these cities show they in general cover the

innovation and social clusters of the so-called datasets of high-value provided in [58].

However, we observe more focus on Transport and mobility as well as Environment and

safety datasets, which are both characterised as innovation cluster data.”

Results – Stakeholders (Q2)

Major observation:

o Interestingly, significantly fewer stakeholder categories than in

typical smart cities program are observed!

o This is consistent with the view that most of the analysed

initiatives adopted bottom up open innovation

“Open Data Ecosystems in these cities have the active participation

of residents, different city authorities, software developers, and

SMEs in providing, curating and consuming the datasets … ”

Participation of non-technical stakeholders are minimal – “token”

Major Findings

Two significant findings from this study:

1) Emerging 2nd generation open data based smart city initiatives

are redefining the respective cities as “Open Innovation

Economies”. This is significantly different from the emphasis of

first generation initiatives with are strongly linked to physical

environment and infrastructure.

2) Need-driven open data initiatives in smart cities such as those

described earlier are exceptions

Conclusion

1) There are still huge potentials and gaps on how open data can

impact smart cities aspects. In particular, need driven,

stakeholder-led data driven innovation programs are still

relatively few.

2) There are currently no rigourous model to fully analyse this

opportunity gap. We are currently investigating such models.

3) Interviews and discussions with City Managers and Open data

program officers in cities may explain and identifies barriers to

need-driven approaches in open data projects in smart cities.

Thank you!

Q&A

Future work

o De-construction of Smart cities and Open data

programs and applying strategic alignment model to

exploit the opportunities.

o The approach will be similar to the strategic alignment

approach used in Organization-IT alignment