SMART Community Review (SCR) SMART Community Exchange 2018 Program | Page 25
SMART Par tnerships
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SMART Community Exchange (SCE) Platform Pilots - Demonstration Projects
Communities across the world are implementing examples
of innovative problem solving. Communities are using
sensors and real-time data to solve specific problems in
areas such as health, transportation, sanitation, public
safety, economic development, sustainability, street
maintenance, and resilience. Electricity, water, and natural
gas meters are connected to the cloud to give subscribers
fine-grained control over their resource usage. Cities and
communities can now use technology tools for much finer-
grained access and management of their streets, above-
ground assets, belowground assets, land, and building.
Their successes reflect the early stages of the
transformation of SMART communities. Communities can
share their best practice , methods, and practice with other
communities through SMART Community Exchange (SCE)
cloud-based platform. This information-sharing platform is
designed help to extend SMART activities beyond local
confines, benefiting all communities, including those that
lack the capacity to innovate on their own. The goal of the
SCE is to allow the accumulation and replication of SMART
solutions and associated data and technologies in ways that
benefit communities with different sizes, different
technological know how, and different financial capabilities. Mapping technologies applicable to communities to actual
challenges requires moving from science-based research
and development to human-focused use cases.
Communities are using sensors (often crowd-sourced) and
real-time data to solve specific problems in domains such as
health, transportation, sanitation, public safety, economic
development, sustainability, street maintenance, and
resilience. Pilot projects are showing the usefulness of
sharing across city-agency and private-sector silos and of
new kinds of analytics. Sophisticated use of data also allows
communities to set more aggressive future metric goals. A
number of forward-looking community plans involving
sustainability and resilience rely upon advances in
technology and data analytics.
International Collaboration and Standards
Standards are a common vehicle for propagating and
benchmarking best practice, as well as for achieving
interoperability. Helping to validate the idea that different
kinds of technology are becoming increasingly important to
the operation of communities is the emergence of
international standards through the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO), familiar to
technology vendors and others for its quality-management
framework and suites of standards for specific kinds of
interoperability. The SCE aims at helping communities
around the world gauge and improve sustainability ISO, as a
part of a suite of standards and part of an effort to promote
benchmarking and learning among communities. ISO both
builds on and informs local technology development and use
activities; compliance with its standards (and other
international standards) is key to participating in the
increasingly global marketplace. Specific kinds of
technologies relevant to urban innovation are associated
with specific sets of standards.
Federal Government cannot fund all the innovation projects
that will move communities forward. Public private
partnerships are very effective in motivating groups to create
SMART projects for change. For relatively little spending,
many local multi-stakeholder teams are energized to come
together to produce well thought-out proposals under very
tight deadlines. The promise of funding motivates the testing
of a complex integrated system that would be impossible to
create otherwise. But even the runner-up teams, which have
put plans in place, are motivated to find funding to
implement their ideas. While the transformations in
communities are largely happening bottom-up, coordination
and acceleration of activity is something that the Federal
Government is uniquely suited to help do. The Department
of Transportation Smart Cities Challenge125 was launched
in December 2015 and is a promising forerunner to
competitions that could be established for cities or districts.
The Federal Government can also benefit from its own in-
house demonstration projects. Some agencies have natural
districts such as campuses and military bases that could
house innovative technology solutions to their infrastructure
challenges.
Website
www.SMARTCommunityExchange.com
Contact
[email protected]