The book “How to build a Digital City’ by Marc Canter – CEO, Digital City Mechanics, is an intense study of the software infrastructure required to build out a Digital City. It’s a step by step guide in how to develop that on-line environment which will mesh in a wide range of participants, vendors, content sources and existing web properties.
The book focuses on a pilot project being developed in Cleveland to innovate workforce development ‘“ called the Digital City Project. It’s a guidebook to the methodology, processes, opportunities and community that Digital City Mechanics is building in Northeast Ohio. It is also used as the textbook for the class “How to build a Digital City’ that Marc teaches at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).
There are many different definitions of what a Digital City is. Marc Carter has a notion of a Digital City with shared civic “servers” which aggregate traffic info, provide open APIs to city services and create an open software infrastructure platform which software developers can use for their own applications and services.
The goals of the Digital City Project are to:
- innovate workforce development (establish digital bureaus in a Digital City using a virtuous circle process)
- invent new kinds of jobs (tech, interactive content production, medical digitizing, urban farming, data scrubbing)
- change how job training happens (learning by doing, intern on a project)
- create compelling interactive on-line multimedia content and services
- create an open Digital City software infrastructure – that can be used by a wide range of software platforms, entities, corporations, government agencies, etc.
- connect Digital City citizens together – both in the real world and in cyberspace
- train people by tricking them into having a good time and building community (by putting them into compelling experience to participate in)
- help foster volunteerism (by rewarding volunteers with ‘points’ which have value in the community)
- use dollars three ways: by training, producing projects and building community
Cleveland has been selected by the Intelligent Community Forum as one of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities for the years 2006 and 2008.
Sources
- “How to build a Digital City’ by Marc Canter – textbook, hi-red pdf (129M), lo-res pdf (27M).
- EECS 396 “How to build a Digital City’ course site (videos from presentations are included).