This report summarizes insights with the intention of advancing a more consistent, collaborative and rigorous fieldwide conversation about sustainability of the civic tech sector. Knight Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation commissioned research to deepen understanding about emerging business models and the dynamics of sustainability for
civic tech organizations, including for-profits and nonprofits. Continue reading
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Platforms, Apps, Solutions
The Open Access Journal Urban Planning has published a special issue related to the topic of smart cities, and more specifically related to the aspect of infrastructure and information. It contains one editorial and three articles that present different smart cities solutions implemented in real-case scenarios. The editors of the special issue are Soora Rasouli, Harry Timmermans and Dujuan Yang. Continue reading
Digital technology has the potential to fundamentally transform the way the public sector operates and delivers services to constituents. Government agencies that are not undergoing a digital transformation risk becoming stale and outdated; but even worse, they will fail to meet the needs of an increasingly digitally savvy citizenry. This new report from GovLoop and Infor presents how digital transformation is changing the way government works and how this transformation can be achieved via cloud computing. Continue reading
Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of Nesta, proposes new ways to improve the effectiveness of philanthropic funding through new technologies. The blog post, “Philanthropy and Innovation,” focuses in particular on open data and artificial intelligence as tools for the field. The post explores how funders could use data; better sift and assess applications; reduce bureaucracy for applicants; strategically scan different fields; and tap into crowd knowledge. Continue reading
Nowadays, many cities collect measurements from several sources of data about the environment, through IoT and other sensing devices that are placed around the city. However, accessing raw data on its own is not sufficient to meaningfully show the data being collected and to allow a range of users to explore what this data may mean for them. This paper presents a novel approach for visualizing urban data and has been implemented as a pilot in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.
Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This paper by Helen K. Liu, an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, synthesizes prior crowdsourcing research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of crowdsourcing in the public sector. Continue reading
With the aim to unveil its horizontal approach to the IoT market, Libelium has launched a new white paper to present 50 real smart projects deployed in 120 countries all over the world. The IoT company has summarized its most successful and appealing stories, developed with Libelium technology and its partners’ ecosystem, for the main verticals of the market. The white paper includes real IoT projects for environment care, water management, precision agriculture, smart cities, parking management, smart building, smart factory, logistics, retail and eHealth. Continue reading