Written by Jason Harper

After a hiatus in August, the Gigabit City Summit returned with its biggest panel to date.

The size was fitting, as the topic for the September 25, 2012, global roundtable was big, too: “Open Government, Big Data, and Innovation.” The driving question was how to take lessons in collaboration, open source, and data from the private sector and apply them to the public sector in order to build “ecosystems of innovation” in our smart cities of the future.

Whereas previous Gigabit City Summits have showcased a series of presentations, GCS3 resembled a sprawling talk show, with fewer PowerPoint slides and more back-and-forth between participants.

Co-chairing the panel along with GCS founders Aaron Deacon (Curiolab, Kansas City) and Dave Sandel (Sandel & Associaties, St. Louis) was Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of San Francisco.

The mood was lively as smart city experts from Barcelona to Singapore to Kansas City (and points between) sparred across international time zones in the Cisco Kansas City TelePresence room. What follows are only some of the highlights — a SportsCenter version of GCS3. For the full play-by-play, check out the archived WebEx presentation, courtesy of the Smart + Connected Cities Institute.

New Collaborative Models

After introductions, Nath opened the government-focused portion of the session by addressing how to create the necessary paradigm shift within the public sector to make way for innovation.

The key factors for change that Nath outlined were making sure that city leaders understand the value of innovation, placing the right executives in charge of the right initiatives, and soliciting feedback from both civic employees and the wider community at every turn. Nath implied that even in a city as progressive as San Francisco, a perspective change must take place in American politics in order to bring about the collaborative environment needed to foster innovative thinking.

Core team member Bill Hutchison (Hutchison Management, Toronto/Moscow) then stressed that good physical communication is at the heart of collaboration, and having a broadband infrastructure in place aids in breaking down silos and fostering teamwork.

Dialing in from Singapore, Gordon Falconer (Director of Urban Innovation Practice, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group) pointed out that because “millennials are more collaborative in their working nature,” cities must be geared up from an infrastructure perspective to facilitate open collaboration. “It’s the way things are going,” Falconer said.

But, argued John McGurk, Chief of Staff to the Mayor at City of Kansas City, Missouri, “Collaboration doesn’t always work in a political environment.”

McGurk, who is working in the city’s search for a new chief innovation officer, noted that mediation is often a more useful skill than collaboration when it comes to politics. “We’re in a mid-20th century process that shies away from innovation,” he said, so it’s important to mediate and find common ground in order to advance forward-thinking initiatives. “You’ve got to put the bumpers up while you’re bowling.”

Nath pointed out that it’s important for city CIOs to act as bridges between the government and the community, and that in order to do accomplish that, CIOs must sometimes educate the citizenry about the inner workings of government and “make the community part of the feedback loop for creating new services and designs.”

Core teamer Josep Pique of the 22@Barcelona project noted that the community must be engaged on a technological level, too — bandwidth, therefore, is key. A big proponent of the cloud, Pique asserted that cities should be “building highways to the cloud” to provide people with access to the future’s public idea space. His fellow Barcelonan Esteve Almirall, leader of the European Open Cities Project, pointed out that sometimes competition can be just as effective as collaboration in driving innovation.

The private sector is filled with examples of businesses that have used innovation to boost profits. Neil McEvoy, founder of Toronto’s Cloud Best Practices Network, shared wisdom on how cities can learn from businesses such as Hewlett-Packard, which developed a suite of services to help companies “break IT innovation gridlock.”

How to break gridlock? Much of any given company’s budget, McEvoy said, is tied up in maintaining existing systems and infrastructure. By reallocating some of that budget for developing new ideas, companies — and by extension, governments — can foster innovation without seeking new funding.

Take the procurement process: in order to acquire essential services, cities must come to the best possible solutions while promoting competition and minimizing cost. Traditionally, procurement has not favored small businesses and startups due to inherent risk factors. But through programs such as the UK’s G-Cloud initiative, the government has leveraged the power and flexibility of cloud computing to enable small tech businesses to participate in procurement.

Open data, too, has played no small role in this highly innovative new model; as more data becomes public, smaller developers are able to build apps that benefit the public good.  And that brings us to the second half…

Open Government & Big Data

As the discussion moved toward making government data more accessible, Frank Lenk of the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), a nonprofit planning organization based in Kansas City, testified to the power of pulling data out of the backrooms and making it public and therefore useful to developers.

“It’s opening up that big store of data locked in government that has the potential to add value to public and private sectors,” Lenk said.

Testifying to the power of open-source models in government was the next presenter: Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist of Red Hat, a global leader in open-source technology (which generously sponsored GCS3).

Hellekson began by citing an unlikely example of a government agency actively working to be more open and innovative — the U.S. Department of Defense, which recently released its second innovation roadmap, “Open Technology Development: Lessons Learned and Best Practices.” Hellekson also praised the U.S. CIO’s new Digital Government Strategy, which aims to use open technology to innovate and deliver better services to citizens, faster.

How are these feds becoming more innovative? Hellekson explained that they are learning how to move more quickly through the S-curve of innovation. This curve shows how an idea for a product moves from (1) the amateur/hobby stage (think an inventor working out of a garage), (2) to the product/commercial stage, (3) to the commodity stage.

“It’s not about creating a better traffic light, it’s about moving through this cycle quicker to get to the next round of innovation,” Hellekson said. “Open source is one of the most powerful mechanisms for moving a good idea through this cycle.”

As readers of this blog already know, another cycle of civic innovation was developed by the Mayors’ Bistate Innovation Team (MBIT) in Kansas City, which aimed to draw out a playbook for leveraging Google Fiber. Sandel therefore took the opportunity to share a page from that book, titled Playing to Win in America’s Digital Crossroads.

MBIT’s “Ecosystem of Civic Innovation,” as you can see, draws in various entities of civic life — from government leaders, to entrepreneurs, to organizations, to infrastructure — to show how they can unite around common principles and concepts to drive the circulation of ideas  into tangible, measurable results.

Of course, turning great ideas into real-life results is one of the biggest challenges in innovation, period. Speaking to that point, Almirall next presented his vision of “Open Innovation in the Public Sector.”

“It’s not about having potentials,” Almirall said, “it’s about being able to mobilize.”

To ensure mobilization, governments must not only be more open (open data, open fiber networks, open sensor networks), they must support user-driven innovation, promote growth, and reinvent citizenship. Almirall discussed the Commons4EU project, of which he is leader, as an example of city-driven open innovation.

Commons4EU: interviews from Waag Society on Vimeo.

Falconer noted that often the problem in mobilization is not the manner but the speed. His fellow Singapore transplant Andres Sevstuk (Leader of the City Form Lab, Singapore University of Technology & Design) took the floor to discuss best practices for government-driven innovation.

Emphasizing that technology is a means, not an end, Sevstuk talked about how a government’s role in innovation is not only to provide data but to also develop common standards for using that data. In looking how to solve real-world problems with technology, cities must get their best citizens involved.

Conclusion

Many other topics flew as the discussion came to a close: how government can best (and legally) collaborate with the private sector, how cities can learn from or compete with one another, how the cloud will redefine the notion of place. No doubt these topics will emerge again and again in future GCS sessions.

At the end of the session, a couple of things stood clear:

• That innovation is driven more by humans working together than by technology-based solutions.

• That while private-sector businesses will continue to innovate organically, it’s on city leaders to engage their citizens and make them a part of the innovation process to truly build a smarter world.

Stay tuned for the next Gigabit City Summit: “Advanced Degrees in Digital City Planning,” scheduled for October 24, 2012, at 7 a.m. CDT.

GSC3 Panel Particpants:
David Sandel – Sandel & Associates, chair
Aaron Deacon – Curiolab, moderator
Jay Nath – Chief Innovation Officer, City of San Francisco
Esteve Almirall – Leader of the European Open Cities Project, Barcelona
Neil McEvoy –  Founder, Cloud Best Practices Network, Toronto
John McGurk – Chief of Staff, Mayor Sly James’ Office, Kansas City, MO
Andres Sevtsuk – Leader of the City Form Lab, Singapore University of Technology & Design
Ger Baron – Amsterdam Innovation Motor
Ray Daniels – Co-Chair, Mayors’ Bistate Innovations Team
Gordon Falconer – Director of Urban Innovation, Smart + Connected Communities Institute, Singapore
Bill Hutchison – Chairman of the i-CANADA Alliance and special consultant to the Skolkovo development in Moscow
Gunnar Hellekson – Chief Technology Strategist, Red Hat

Early this past Wednesday morning, on the eve of Google’s long-anticipated Fiber announcement, Kansas City leaders got an important reminder: Don’t let Google Fiber distract you from what you’re already doing.

That advice came from Bill Hutchison, founder of the iCANADA Alliance and developer of intelligent community projects in Toronto and Skolkovo, Russia.

Part of the Gigabit City Summit Core Team, Hutchinson (speaking from Moscow), joined fellow team members via Cisco TelePresence from Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Singapore to talk about how they’ve built and successfully sustained smart city projects in places far and wide. Their projects are the kinds of technology-driven, economy-boosting initiatives that Kansas City has begun dreaming of since being given the Google Fiber golden ticket in 2010. And they’ve done it all without the benefit of Google.

Unlike in KC, which is having its network infrastructure installed for free courtesy of Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech company, Hutchison and his colleagues come from places where no one handed them the keys to the broadband. Yet they have managed to collaborate with local businesses, governments, and organizations to create landscape-altering projects such as the 22@ Barcelona innovation district, which transformed an industrial portion of the city into a hub of entrepreneurship and technology-based urban renewal; and the Amsterdam Innovation Motor, which has brought fiber to 100,000 households and expects to have the entire city connected in three years.

For Kansas City, a metropolis on the brink of lighting-fast connectivity, learning from other cities’ successes is crucial. Over the remaining 10 months, the Gigabit City Summit will offer a distance-learning course in smart city planning.

Session 2: Leadership, Organization, and Community Challenges

The theme of the July 25 session, “Leadership, Organization, and Community Challenges,” addressed the issue of how cities can succeed in a new, Internet-empowered economy that prizes sustainability, civic-supported innovation, open access, constant connectivity, high-performance collaboration, and the breaking down of silos. The goal: to spur innovation on a local level so that your city can compete globally.

Following introductory remarks by organizer Dave Sandel of Sandel + Associates and facilitator Mike Brown of the Brainzooming Group, the Core Team members gave presentations about their cities’ respective projects.

Some highlights:

• Bill Hutchison outlined his intelligent community work in Toronto and Skolkovo, noting that community outreach is essential with visionary projects that take years to break ground and cost millions of dollars. (He amusingly compared the act of selling sky-high gigabit concepts to the populace with the plight of Eureka salesmen peddling vacuums to 1940s housewives.)
• Ger Baron and Isabel Brouwer described the philosophies that power the Amsterdam Innovation Motor, a cluster-based knowledge network that unites innovators across all realms — science, creative trades, entrepreneurship, medicine — into a knowledge network that has created jobs, broken down silos, and made Amsterdam a global, new-economy player. (Watch a cool video about AIM.)
• Gordon Falconer, director of Urban Innovation at the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group in Singapore, talked about the advantages of working in a city-state where there are fewer regulatory roadblocks to innovation and the government takes a proactive approach in implementing economic-development initiatives and attracting global collaborators.
• Josep Pique and Carles Sans gave a comprehensive look at the Barcelona Digital Technology Centre, a 2,000 sq. meter building located in the heart of 22@Barcelona that houses a 100-employee team of IT and communication technology engineers who proffer a multitude of expert services to the local business community, from mobile app design to telecom to training.
• Lastly, David Warm of Kansas City’s Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) shared the strategies that shaped the Mayors’ Bistate Innovation Team’s Google Fiber playbook, namely:(1) Universal Access, (2) Driving Innovation, (3) Expanding Economic Opportunities, (3) Establishing Global Leadership.

A WebEx archive of the session presentation slides and audio will be available soon courtesy of the Smart + Connected Cities Institute.

Conclusion: Fiber Going Forward

The Summit ended on a hopeful note for Kansas City.

Much as they did at the first Summit (in the presence of Mayors Sly James and Joe Reardon of KCMO and KCK), the Core Team applauded MBIT’s playbook as a good framework for making KC a smarter, more connected place — a framework, remember, that was devised with no actual knowledge of how the Fiber program would shake out.

Now that Google has officially announced its pricing plans and rollout schedule for providing Fiber to KC residential neighborhoods (but only those that show adequate demand), it’s time to start thinking about implementation.

written by Jason Harper

David Warm, Executive Director of the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), shared some of the steps he is taking around leadership and organization of the digital economy in Kansas City in the wake of Google Fiber’s product announcement last week. MARC has been charged with incubating the organizational structure that will coordinate execution of the playbook produced by the Mayors’ Bistate Innovations Team.

Warm also reflects on the value of the roundtable format of the Gigabit City Summit:

The next meeting of the Gigabit City Summit will take place for July 25, 7:00-9:00 am CDT. The topic for this session is Leadership, Organization and Community Challenges.

Join us live via WebEx through the Smart + Connected Communities Institute.

As we pass from a legacy economy into a new global economy accelerated by Internet technologies, we are developing new economy management styles. These new forms of management and organization embrace sustainability, high performance collaboration, an accelerated pace of innovation, open access, a new awareness of social consciousness and the need to work across silos. For a new economy Gigabit City organization to be effective, however, its leadership, organization and partnerships must strike a balance between the new and the old, embracing the characteristics of the new economy while making use of some of the best management attributes of the legacy economy. This session will discuss successes and challenges related to governance, leadership, organization, community and partnership in leading the Gigabit City.

Panelists for this session include:

• Ger Baron – Program and Cluster Mgr., Amsterdam Innovation Motor
• Srinivas Chary – Dean, Admin. Staff, College of India
• Vijaya Venkataraman – ICT leader, Admin. Staff College of India
• Mike Burke – Co-Chair, Mayors’ Bi-State Innovation Team
• Ray Daniels – Co-Chair, Mayors’ Bi-State Innovation Team
• David Warm – Executive Director, Mid-America Regional Council
• Gordon Falconer - AAPI MRICS, Dir. Urban Innovation, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group
• Bill Hutchison – Chairman, i-CANADA Alliance; CEO, Hutchison Management International
• Josep Pique – Director, Strategic Sectors – 22@, Barcelona City Council
• Carles Sans – Business Development Manager, Barcelona Digital Centre Tecnològic

For the past year, Kansas City’s business and community leaders have been enthusiastic in collaborating with each other to imagine ways Google Fiber can benefit the city. But one big question that’s rarely been addressed is, “What can we learn from other cities around the world?”

Local broadband talk went global this past Wednesday, June 27, early in the morning at the local Cisco headquarters. Gathering in a state-of-the-art TelePresence room, city leaders from both sides of the state line joined a cadre of local and international strategists and smart city experts in discussing ways cities can become smarter by learning from each other.

Wednesday’s inaugural Gigabit City Summit was the first in a 12-part monthly series of teleconferences that will address how high-speed broadband can be harnessed to improve areas of civic life, including education, social justice, digital inclusion, urban innovation, workplace development, healthcare, entrepreneurship, and more.

What Is the Gigabit City Summit?

The Summit was developed by KC gigabit champions Aaron Deacon of Curiolab and Mike Brown and his colleagues at The Brainzooming Group (who led the Building the Gigabit City sessions last year), along with St. Louis-based smart city planner Dave Sandel of Sandel & Associates.

Described as a “global dialog on smart and connected cities,” the Summit series aims to provide a platform for peer cities to exchange ideas and share critical factors in successful adoption and use of high-speed broadband.

Wednesday’s session brought out a full house: Along with the trio of planners (Deacon, Brown and Barrett Sydnor of Brainzooming, and Sandel); KCMO and KCK Mayors Sly James and Joe Reardon, along with Mike Burke and Ray Daniels of the Mayors’ Bistate Innovation Team, participated in a facilitated discussion centered around a presentation by Tim Campbell (via teleconference from Amsterdam). Campbell, who also had a hand in planning the Summit, is the author of the book Beyond Smart Cities, a study of how cities thrive by building relationships with each other across international lines.

Also joining the discussion virtually were Gordon Falconer, Director of Urban Innovation at Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group;  the Smart + Connected Communities Institute (via Singapore); Bill Hutchison, Chairman of the i-CANADA Alliance (via Moscow); and Josep Pique, Director of Strategic Sectors at 22@Barcelona.

Discussion Highlights: Beyond Smart Cities

In researching his book, Campbell asked leaders in 53 cities around the world to discuss where they get their new ideas. In addition to the all-important act of sending delegates to visit other cities (notable example: Seattle, which has sent 100 business and civic leaders to a foreign city every year since 1993), Campbell found that the smartest cities tend to do the following:

*   Formalize their search for knowledge by making it regular, continuous, and strategic, with an eye toward diversity and inclusiveness (e.g. Seattle).
*   Develop a “tissue of remembering” in the form of databases, documentation, websites, and other repositories where knowledge can be stored.
*   Form “clouds of trust” by making that knowledge public and building networks that include the city’s “hidden leaders” (Campbell cited MBIT’s Google Fiber Playbook as a great example).

Those are just a few of the highlights. Be sure to check back for a more in-depth content recap.

The Takeaway: Collaborators Without Borders

The broadest and most compelling thing that emerged at the Summit, however, was the idea that to truly innovate, cities must emphasize person-to-person interaction over technological thinking. As Sandel put it, “A successful Gigabit City is 90 percent sociology and 10 percent infrastructure.”

In other words, while coming up with cool new apps for broadband-empowered technology is important (who wouldn’t want a virtual 3D doctor and your beck and call?), the first step is to encourage dialog and collaboration between visionaries,  decision makers, and other smart city stakeholders. And that dialog must take place across borders, whether that’s a state line (KS/MO) or a continent.

As Mayor James said: “The first innovative thing we’ve done in government was to work together.”

written by Jason Harper