How to Build Smart Cities Via Minimum Viable City

Publicity

If you ask 100 or 1000 people on the streets whether they have heard about such application, we can almost guarantee that none have heard that. It’s also the fault of local councils, who only use their official website portal to announce or publicize the citizen engagement mobile app. There’s no continuous effort in educating the public.

Finding the Concerned Citizens

What are the types of individuals concerned about the cleanliness or the safety of the surrounding? Sometimes, they prefer to complain but not act upon when given the opportunity to participate. The selfishness of the citizens sometimes hinders such services since people are only concerned about themselves and their homes rather than the whole community or their city.

Gamification if Necessary

People want an incentive to participate in crowdsourcing initiative—either get themselves paid monetarily or through prizes. The other way is to gamify the app in such a way that gives some form of status within the community app.

Pressure Groups

No administrators of the cities would want to handle hundreds or thousands of complaints each day throughout the year. But if they did not manage and close the complaints, how could they solve all the problems which are already in the queue? Sometimes, city authorities need a little push or “pressure” from the people.

Social Media Channels

The most popular communication channel used by local councils are phone, fax and e-mail. But technology has rapidly changed the landscape, thus, allowing the citizens to communicate on their favorite social media channels.

In-house vs. Outsource

There are a lot of similar citizen engagement mobile apps in the market. But most of them forget that the backend system that handles the reports are not visible to them. Nearly all local council IT departments are not set up as a product development house. The budget given to them are only enough to operate, manage, and maintain the IT system but not enough for innovation and application development.

Product Roadmap

Handling the continuous development and future enhancement of the backend system requires the sustainable IT support resources. New technology emerges and thus, it must quickly be adapted with the current process workflow.

Smart City Vision

Citizen engagement is only one of the single components in a Smart City. They are many applications, which require integration to a smart city platform; thus, it cannot be developed in silo manner. A real Smart City needs an integrated platform that collects and aggregates various sources of data (structured or unstructured) to discover the insights of the city and make cities a better and sustainable place to live.

It’s NOT an IT Job!

Of course, any IT company can develop the mobile app. However, IoT requires different skills that encompass embedded programming, understanding different communications protocols, cloud services, and big data analytics.

Building Smart Cities using IoT is not easy as it seems. We must build the right business models and ensure the investments are justified to address the real pain-points of the citizens.