Move Over, Silos

Fiware is a Business Reporter client.

Before you get to the technology of smart cities, you have to get organizations and citizens’ mindset right.

Human perspective, open-source tech, collaboration and open standards are required to create the technology of smart cities—a hot topic of discussion as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and AI-assisted data analysis are increasingly applied to the infrastructure of many urban areas. Large parts of urban infrastructure worldwide aren’t yet “smart,” meaning that, from a technological standpoint, there’s tremendous room for improvement.

Especially in the wake of a global pandemic, the need for tech-smart, resilient, cost-effective and sustainable solutions—such as smart building and manufacturing automation and intelligent transportation—has significantly increased. From check-in to autonomous cleaning robots, what we see in many airports worldwide, for example, speaks volumes about the smart innovations currently available.

Now more than ever, leaders on a national and local level are looking into building more intelligent infrastructure, and how citizens fit into this strategy. From how people move around a city and experience buildings to the ways that goods are moved worldwide, such issues are being addressed from many different perspectives.

At FIWARE Foundation, guiding cities and organizations toward innovative approaches to a greener, smarter, more sustainable and resilient tomorrow is at the forefront of our mission. To realize the smart future, we rely on a pool of thousands of talented and committed individuals and organizations that comprise our thriving community.

The stories you will read below have been put together by FIWARE Community members Jim Craig and Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat), Francesca Nafissi (WiseTown), and Andrea Gómez and Antonio Jara (HOPU), alongside Val De Oliveira (FIWARE Foundation). They will take readers on a compelling journey that shows how they are delivering solutions in a faster, easier, interoperable and cost-effective way that avoids vendor lock-in scenarios and follows an open-source approach.

From the need for human-centered solutions and the breaking down of silos to the effects of urban heat islands, these stories offer a concise account of how open-source tech and open standards are the beacon and catalyst of future innovation.

Breaking down the silos

FIWARE has developed a four-step process for implementing smart cities, the first step being to remove the silos. Easy: call a meeting with department heads and tell them to work together. Job done.

Unfortunately, it takes much more effort. We’ve learned from working with many global organizations across various vertical markets that most operate in a traditional command-and-control style. This inflexibility manifests in a number of ways, creating and reinforcing silo mentalities and decreasing collaboration.

The siloed city may include IoT solutions for parking, streetlights or public transport, but the challenge arises with technology integration. Take a scenario in which the streetlights near a bus stop are switched on at night for the safety and convenience of passengers when they are embarking and disembarking, then switched off once sensors determine passengers are out of range. Vertically integrated and highly siloed solutions make this difficult; public transit, power and the streetlamps are all provided and maintained by different entities.

How can a city organization deliver integrated services without information silos? A Red Hat Labs residency can help, using a five-step process:

Align: In a transparent and open space, align cross-functional teams to share goals and boost work visualization.

Build: Over one to three months, create a cross-functional team to solve a real problem. The Open Practice Library’s methods for developing social contracts, pairing, mentoring and best practices for remote-first work will cultivate transparency and trust among team members—an essential ingredient for success.

Scope: By solving one problem at a time, big goals are broken into small tasks, building toward an integrated solution that is finally demoed to sponsors.

Demo: At the close of every residency, holding a Demo Day ensures that the team is presenting to and getting ideas from the right stakeholders. With this tight feedback loop, the team can build a well-scoped roadmap to bring its smart city product to life.

Scale: By sharing this knowledge, other teams will be enabled to develop an approach that can be scaled throughout the business to proactively address other challenges.

Moving toward smart cities

The fast physical, cultural and social transformations taking place in cities makes the work of urban planners and policy makers more difficult than it has been in the past. Understanding and managing the processes that characterize cities today is key to addressing the challenges of effective planning for the future.

One of these processes is proper data management—WiseTown’s core business—which plays a crucial role in this innovation journey, and translates into a rethinking of public administration processes along a digitalization path. Within this framework, a key component that must never be undervalued is the human element of the digital revolution.

The European Union’s latest Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) underlines that, especially in Italy, there is a lack of proper cultural preparation capable of supporting and growing virtuous innovation processes. Investing in people is the first fundamental step toward creating a smart city that is truly effective and sustainable.

Civic technologies are fundamentals for WiseTown—a FIWARE Foundation Gold Member—for effective data management and analysis, and to support the development of efficient relationships and communications between government agencies, citizens and companies.

Creating authentic participatory processes is increasingly important within our cities. For this reason, WiseTown, which won the South Europe Startup Award for Best Civic Tech Startup in 2020, has been supporting its data management and urban tech solutions with its Civic Tech Academy training program, which aims to provide adequate cultural preparation for the use of technologies in participatory smart cities.

The academy mainly serves government executives and civil servants, but also utility service providers and citizens. Creating a widespread culture based on innovation, digitalization and data management is a prerequisite to ensure that the adopted technological strategies are truly effective.

It’s difficult to imagine a technological transfer without understanding the technology and its uses. For this reason, WiseTown’s academy focuses on the practical challenges of innovation processes, creating space for debate, dialogue—and economic growth.

For more details on urban data and how WiseTown can help public administrations explore the opportunities that new technologies offer for cities and communities, visit wise.town/civic-tech.

UHIs and smart cities: the Seville case

Seville, the capital of southern Spain’s Andalusia region, shares something with many other metropolitan cities worldwide: its temperature is on the rise, from an average of 18.4 C. in 1950 to 19.7 C. recently, due to climate change.

The impact of warming temperatures is often worse in built-up areas, where urban heat islands (UHIs) are generated. UHIs are warmer than their surrounding areas due to human activities and changes in the natural landscape, impacting resource consumption (water and energy) across homes, businesses and public buildings. UHIs have a direct impact on urban health.

Spain-based HOPU—also a FIWARE Foundation Gold Member—is making a positive impact and helping planners to avoid UHIs. The organization empowers environmental innovation with AI, IoT and Big Data for environmental assessment, using available data to contextualise, model and forecast the environmental situation for informed decision-making.

HOPU has been working with the city of Seville to identify UHIs through real-time monitoring, based on its own IoT air-quality devices and external datasets such as Copernicus, open datasets and others. The use of AI, specifically long short-term memory (LSTM) networks based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), helps planners understand the effects of UHIs on urban behaviors, such as resource consumption. HOPU identifies and models UHIs using water and energy consumption datasets and location intelligence capabilities, for effective anomaly detection, prediction and mitigation actions.

Using the FIWARE open-source approach, HOPU manufactures IoT-based environmental monitoring devices called Smart Spots. These measure gases such as sulphur oxide and nitrogen oxide, detect toxic substances like alcohol and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and identify specific particulate matter (PM) like dust (PM10), pollen (PM10–PM40), pollutants (PM2.5) and viruses (<PM1).

Through the EDI incubation program for Big Data startups and SMEs in Europe, HOPU explores this market with relevant data sources from big companies such as EMASESA, Seville’s water supply and sanitation company. Through the program, HOPU is receiving mentoring to build an end user-driven tool that will be focused on the needs of utility suppliers, cities and new areas of focus such as smart buildings.

Finally, new collaborations are on HOPU’s roadmap to develop environmental and UHI analysis for Seville using city datasets, including with Acciona I’mnovation, part of the Lanzadera business accelerator and incubator program.

_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credits: header image iStock 1182453302, body image 1 - image courtesy of Red Hat, a FIWARE Foundation Platinum Member, body image 2- WiseTown_moving_towards_smart_cities – Envato Element, body image 3 - HOPU and the Lanzadera team, image courtesy of HOPU}