Several experts and policy makers from Spain and the EU express their views on Smart Cities and FI-WARE at the FI-WARE Smart City event which was held in Santander, Spain, on 16-18 October. Experts answer to questions such as ‘˜what are smart cities and why they are important’

Beth Noveck, director of the Governance Lab at New York University, discusses how citizens and communities can use open data as a powerful, collaborative tool to influence policymaking.

The BBC’s Jonny Dymond spent a day in the offices of NYC Open Data and met city workers and entrepreneurs trying to understand – and build on – how New York shares with its citizens the digital data it collects about them.

Code for Sacramento is network of civic-minded volunteers who contribute their skills toward using the web as a platform for local government and community service. On 31/5 and 1/6, coders, designers, and civic enthusiasts descended on Sacramento for a National Day of Civic Hacking event. The video contains interviews with organizers and participants talking about how civic hacking helps our cities.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati, believes there are now huge opportunities for entrepreneurs with products that can make a city smarter.

A debate hosted by Intelligence Squared brought together four prominent speakers from the urbanism world to discuss the potential of technologically-enabled cities. The event is chaired by Tony Travers from the London School of Economics.

“We see this digital space of empowering our citizens as the next generation of city government,” Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer San Francisco in the“Connected Empowerment’ video, published by Qualcomm Spark.