One week ago at the Smart Cities Expo World 2016

SCEW 2016 has been an amazing experience! With more than 420 speakers from the five continents, 591 exhibitors and around 16,688 registered visitors, the event has been dense and inspiring. During the course of the three-day event, the congress sessions voiced leading experts and decision-makers from all around the world, and featured intens, high-quality debates about innovative solutions, current challenges and future visions to develop Smart Cities for citizens.

For Martel Innovate this has been the third edition we attended in relation to a number of activities our team is involved in; activities that focus on promotion and development of Smart Services for Smart Cities and most of all for Socially-aware Smart Citizens.

Dr. Monique Calisti, Executive Director of Martel Innovate, has participated as one of the panelist speakers at the Collaborative Platforms for Digital Social Innovation and Sustainability session. Innovations in areas such as open data, open hardware and crowdsourcing provide new ways of using technology to involve people, their knowledge and their assets in solving social challenges. However, these innovations are often disconnected from the public services where they can have the most impact. In this perspective, the panel was invited to animate discussions around how can cities and public institutions best support and work with these innovations to collaborate with citizens to deliver truly smart public services.

Monique presented the experience gained through involvement in the Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation, CAPS, initiative promoted by the European Commission through which an increasing number of projects and initiatives help empowering citizens through the deployment of digital technologies.

This ambitious vision requires public institutions, policy makers, and digital social innovators to understand the relationship between different needs, perspectives and experiences. CAPS, as discussed at the SCEW 2016, is helping to connect the dots by:

• Engaging different stakeholders, while empowering them via openly accessible knowledge, tools and resources.
• Facilitating experiences learned across the whole community to be shared – scale-up effect.
• Creating a culture where innovation for the Digital Society is at the service of citizens.
  

At SCEW 2016, Martel has been also animating discussions with a number of international players involved in building innovative Smart Cities services and interested in the deployment and adoption of FIWARE as a secure and reliable infrastructure where data gathered by the city or published by third parties can be exploited on multi-side business models. Through Martel’s involvement in FIWARE Mundus, SmartSDK and FIWARE MEXICO we established contacts with a number of international players interested in joining the FIWARE Community and adopting Open and Standard APIs for the development of Smart Cities applications and services.

The three days in Barcelona have been as always amazing. We are looking forward to be back at the next edition in November 2017!