Interesting smart cities, smart government, open data and open government news, found by the FreeBalance Strategy & Innovation Group.
OPEN GOVERNMENT & TRUST: Government transparency is about trust, yet “key measures of trust are at historic lows,” according to a new report from the Open Government Partnership. The report asserts that “as societies progress people become increasingly knowledgeable about government activities, leading to higher expectations of government to perform. Trust levels follow these patterns in ups and downs.” This report comes at a time when many countries have been unable to meet OGP commitments. Syriacus Buguzi of The Citizen reported on the Government of Tanzania recent mysterious and “temporarily” pull out of the OGP
SMART CITY MARKET FASTEST GOVTECH GROWTH: Karen Graham described a BCC Research report in Digital Journal that found that the smart city market is the fast growing government technology market “expected to hit $775 billion in 2021 …with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.7 percent.” Safety, environmental and cost factors are driving the smart city market. But, as Adam Stone reported in February in Government Technology: “only 16 percent of cities could self-fund a smart city initiative, according to Black and Veatch’s newly released 2017 Strategic Directions: Smart City/Smart Utility Report.” Meanwhile, “an effort by Apple to prevent spam may unintentionally undo years of digital government app development,” wrote Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America. Pahlka described how the Apple AppStore will ban “white-labeled” applications in order to reduce spam. “Apple has decided to include white-labeled government apps in this category. In other words, cities will no longer be allowed to have branded apps of their own, unless they create them entirely from scratch AND promise that these apps do not share any code.”
WELLBEING, SMART SECURITY AND SMART PRIVACY: Joshua J. Yates pondered the “soul” of the smart city in an essay in The Hedgehog Review. “What would we be willing to trade for a cleaner, safer, more efficient, more sustainable, and even more pleasurable urban existence? For cities across the world, this is the overwhelming challenge of daily governance.” Yates confronted the impact of tech firm hype, future of work, wellbeing, government nudging, artificial intelligence algorithms, and technocratic elitism. Wellbeing as integral to the smart city was discussed by Stephen Goldsmith and Jane Wiseman in Governing. “Government typically does today what it did yesterday. But what if local officials looked anew at their cities’ goals and measured activities and results against those goals? Such a review might indeed lead to changes in the mix of current activities and identification of new ones,” according to Goldsmith and Wiseman.
