Raluca travelled this week to Manchester, where the EPIC final workshop took place on the 28th of August within the Smart City track of the 4th ENoLL Living Lab Summer School 'Connected Smart & Creative Cities' 2013. The discussions focused on EPIC’s vision, roadmap, results and practical advice on using the platform’s offering “Smart City in a Box” to create and run smart city services. However, the main attraction of the workshop, attended by 25+ participants, was the interactive presentation which used Manchester itself as an example of EPIC’s Smart Environment Service. The hands-on session galvanized the interest of the attendees, which expressed their curiosity on how the platform gathers and uses data.
During the Q&A session, intense, but stimulating debates arose from the sustainability and exploitation aspects of the Project. The attendees asked specific questions regarding IBM’s involvement with the EPIC platform, future sustainability scenarios, transition from project to business entity, as well as ownership of intellectual property rights. General inquiries about European funding streams were also made, in order to better understand projects like EPIC.