Topic: smart-people

Over the years, the sophistication of technology has brought with it, consequently, the automation of jobs. Thanks to the advancement and improvement of the internet and personal devices, connecting with different parts of the world became possible, enabling people to work from anywhere.
However, technology continues to evolve, as do the ways of working. How will these advances affect the workplace? Why is it important to talk about governance to correctly develop policies around companies and workers?

Civic engagement is not only essential for formal city planning processes, but it is at the core of digital urban transformation into smart and sustainable cities and communities. The most widely used ways of engaging citizens, town hall meetings and surveys (even with social media campaigns), leave citizen participation rates low and a majority of citizens in the dark about what is being done in their city.

Enabling citizens to provide opinions and feedback as well as to participate in decision making processes is the subject of this top list. Through new forms of urban governance and participation, cities and communities embrace the ability to collaborate with their citizens to co-create a better and smarter city for all.

Explore five leading citizen engagement solutions that aim to bridge the gap between local government, especially city planners, and citizens.

When it comes to public safety, smart city leaders recognize the importance of engaging with citizens and encouraging them to report safety problems. In this article, we present a perspective on public safety — and focus on Vizsafe, a U.S. startup firm which discovered opportunities to incentivize citizens and improve safety by creating a platform which connects the power of crowdsourcing and smartphone technologies with a blockchain-based rewards system.

Smart education is a key ingredient in smart city development. Strengths in basic education, advanced training and certification, universities and community colleges, e-learning infrastructure, lifelong learning and innovation in education technologies are all part of what defines a smart city. "For the citizens of a smart city to thrive, we must first place education at its center," according to Dr. I-Chang Tsai, Vice President and Director General of Digital Education, Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan. Smart cities recognize the need for "education programs producing graduates with modern knowledge, practical skills and collaborative attitudes."

When we think of smart cities, we tend to think in futuristic terms. We often use the language and iconography of futurism to express our visions of what a smart city should look like. But we should also look to the past for lessons and examples of how previous generations handled the challenges of planning and developing urban spaces.

The evolution of smart cities has shifted from technology-centered approaches via government-led strategies to a human-centric focus. We have discussed this recently in our article Towards a new paradigm of the smart city.

Considering the benefits of a human-centric approach, the question is how a city can tap into the collective intelligence of citizens, entrepreneurs, businesses or other organizations to accelerate the development of a more livable and prosperous city. Collective intelligence can be considered as a key success factor for a smart city (see A review of becoming a smart city).