This month Susie Ruston McAleer, Managing Director from 21c presented the PoliVisu project and SELECT for Cities to delegates at the annual Global Forum taking place this year in the city of Copenhagen. As part of the Smart and Intelligent Cities panel, Susie joined speakers including Sylvie Albert, Professor of Economics from the University of Winnipeg, Hanne Melin, Policy Strategy Counsel and Head, eBay and Alan Shark, Executive Director & CEO, Public Technology Institute, amongst others.
Susie shared PoliVisu’s premise of helping the public sector harness the power of big data to create easy-to-read visualisations to engage stakeholders in mobility policy debate and create more sustainable data driven decisions. She explained that alongside the advance visualisations themselves, PoliVisu aims to remove some of the barriers and costs to finding and using data. The PoliVisu toolkit will feature big data best practices including pragmatic techniques such as how to negotiate a good big data contract with the private sector. And on an accessibility level it is aiming to revolutionise access to data – making it as easy as find as a good chocolate cake recipe online. The talented geo-metadata team are working to make policy ready data accessible though Googles rich snip cards – so relevant data, and visualisations to understand the data can be found, during a normal search in the browser.
Speaking about the challenges Cities faced in harnessing their data and transforming it into actionable intelligence, Susie showcased how SELECT for Cities is turning cities into smart service innovation labs through advance data platforms and city dashboards. She shared how the ground-breaking dashboards have been designed to be created and personalised by city workers, decision makers the public and the private sector and are fully open source, using open standards to facilitate open innovation and reduce vendor lock-in. Dynamic visualisations (including 3D) help users to combine and drill down into data, even to sensor level, to find correlations and generate actionable insights, and use of predictive analytics enable situations to be mitigated before they arise. Susie explained how the project is being run as an R&D competition to help accelerate innovation and that to date five platform prototypes have been built by different contractors and three platforms are about to enter Living Lab testing in Helsinki and Antwerp early next year.
The Global Forum/Shaping the Future is an internationally recognized think-tank for exchange and networking among governments at national, regional & local levels, private & public organizations, research & development experts. The independent, high profile, international, non-for-profit event is dedicated to business and policy issues affecting the successful evolution of the Digital Society. The Global Forum brings each year in a different city around the world more than 300 key policy-makers and public/private stakeholders from more than 30 countries from all continents, it is often considered as the Davos for ICT.