The Smart Cities workpackages

The Smart Cities project is made up of six workpackages.

Workpackage 1 - Project management

Led by Intercommunale Leiedal. This involves:

• Training financial officers from project partners
• Overseeing on-going activities and identifying lessons learnt
• Organisation of the International Mainstreaming Group (IMG)
• Organisation of project meetings

Workpackage 2 - Methodology

Led by Edinburgh Napier University.

The Smart Cities Regional Academic Network is led by Edinburgh Napier University. This network includes a number of academic partners (Edinburgh Napier University, MEMORI, and UAS Oldenberg), one commercial partner (Porism Ltd.) and several associate partners (Agder University, Groningen University, and Karlstad University) from across the NSR.

The network’s principal role is to offer hands-on support to the government partners, to qualify good practices and to accurately translate pilots into transferable good practice, white papers and methodologies. The network is working to identify good practice inside the project by developing project wide monitoring and evaluation tools, by collaborative joint working with municipal partners to supporting the development of local pilots, and by identifying relevant good practice outside the project – e.g. by reviewing cases on epractice.eu and identifying lessons from other relevant projects. Our academic and research outputs are disseminated via the epractice.eu network (DG Info), academic publications and briefings to central governments.

Workpackage 3 - Customer Services and Service Platform

Led by the Cities of Kristiansand and Kortrijk.

The municipalities and regions that are taking part in the Smart Cities project are rethinking how they deliver services to the public and which delivery channels they should use: face to face, internet, mobile, telephone etc.. At the same time, they are working to reorganise their internal service delivery processes and back office functions.

Work Package 3 partners are working together to develop an EU service list. This service list will provides a uniform, structured way of identifying (and providing information on) the public services that are delivered by municipalities across the EU. This will be the first trans- European service list of its kind, and is a development of the UK’s esd-toolkit. Smart Cities partners are also working on delivering better customer contact centres. Their aim is to develop a ‘single point of contact’ for citizens, that delivers services and information to citizens by answering questions, transferring calls to relevant departments and by handling some types of service cases. The Smart Cities partners have also been working on local pilots to develop new standards and services, where either the methodology or the underlying process is potentially transferable to other partners, with a particular emphasis on developing or re-engineering e-services.

Workpackage 4 - Wireless

Led by the City of Groningen.

Mobile is the future. Smart Cities’ partners are developing a range of new and innovative services for mobile platforms, while testing and evaluating new forms of urban wireless networks. The wide use of mobile phones and the emergence of municipal wifi networks allows local governments to deliver new services, or to adapt existing e-services to bring them closer to citizens or workers on the move. Research shows that e-services enabled for mobile phone manage to reach social groups who currently make limited use of public e-services.

Workpackage 5 - User Involvement, Profiling and Take-up

Led by Norfolk County Council.

Public services need to adapt to the needs of citizens. Often new e-services are technology-initiated, but Smart Cities starts with the user. Sociology, marketing and economic science have a lot to offer to the developers of e-services. This means bringing a range of data sources together to develop accurate profiles of target customer groups. The Smart Cities project partners are using a wide range of geographical, transactional, demographic and survey data to better understand citizen’s needs and to reengineer services. This will allow partners to identify and use the most appropriate service channels for different target groups, and to proactively provide services that will meet their needs. This will ensure that services are designed and implemented in ways that recognise the specific needs of different groups of citizens. When combined with the methods of co-design, the Smart Cities partners will be able to use a strong mix of knowledge and established best practices to do a better customer profiling and to identify the most appropriate channel choices for service delivery.

Workpackage 6 - Mainstreaming

Led by Intercommunale Leiedal.

The goal of the mainstreaming activities of Smart Cities is to get central governments involved in the project in such a way that they really understand the potential of pilots and methodologies. This involvement will facilitate the transfer of the learning and practice from these bottomup pilots to national strategies, with the potential that the solutions developed by the Smart Cities partners are rolled-out across countries. Twice a year the project will host an International Mainstreaming Group meeting, where these national decision makers will be able to review the project’s progress and will provide feedback that will shape the project’s development. All seven central governments from partner countries have made a commitment be involved in the project in this way.

National governments are a key factor for transferring technology and solutions to other regions and municipalities. A number of National and Central governments have already become partners of the Smart Cities project, and we are approaching more. The knowledge and commitment from these partners will lead to a sustainable transfer of the services developed in the project to other areas in the North Sea Region. Smart Cities also works closely with the European ePractice.eu community.

Smart Cities has already delivered one international conference (‘Creating Smarter Cities’) and three international e-gov academies to bring together practitioners, mainstreamers, academics and local municipalities, and the project continues to develop links with other relevant projects. Communities on epractice.eu and LinkedIn are key dissemination routes for the project’s activities and findings.