CROSSING THE FINISH LINE TOWARDS YOUR SMART CITY PROGRAM

From the SmartCityTech partnership, we have organized a workshop for the next week during the SmartCityExpo in Barcelona.

Full information and flyer

Room:   CC1 – 1.3

Day:      15th of November of 2018

Time:     16.30 – 18.30

SmartCityTech is an initiative that gathers in a strategic way several European Cluster organizations related to Smart City solutions development. During the last years, Smart City programs are being developed by few cities (especially large ones), able to gather large multi-disciplinary teams to plan and run them. Nevertheless, at European level, most of its cities are small or medium and, therefore, they ability to attract and support qualified and multi-disciplinary human resources is reduced. Furthermore, technology evolution pace is high and leads to uncertainty when evaluating, for instance, infrastructure investment. Besides evolution and uncertainty, new challenges linked with data protection and privacy arise from the increased technology usage.

Therefore, to be able to design, plan, execute and monitor a Smart City program, especially in smaller cities and communities, managers need to understand technology trends, interact with multidisciplinary teams, evaluate business models, understand PPP mechanisms, promote Innovative Public Procurement and understand new challenges that arise from data collection and information discovery.

During this session, SmartCityTech partners and our keynote speaker will share concerns and challenges to prepare the ground for an interactive session, dedicated to defining contents, methodologies and relevant stakeholders for a Smart City program manager training program.

Guided by a group of experienced professionals, the audience will work on defining their challenges and possible ways to overcome them:

      - What are the relevant disciplines to engage in a smart city program?

      - What should a team manager understand about technologies and tools?

      - How to design and evaluate different business models for infrastructure and data?

      - What are the main concerns when collecting data from citizens and vehicles behaviour?

      - How can cities monetize the infrastructure and data?

      - Shall cities invest in their own infrastructure or joint efforts with private sector?

The first part of the session (about 30 minutes) will be dedicated to creating a common understanding of what is a Smart City programme, who needs to be involved and what are the main challenges.

The second part of the session will gather the audience, project team and invited experts in a World-Café format workshop. Teams will be created, and challenges and possible solutions will be distributed to each table. Table members (including invited experts) will debate concrete problems they are facing, or they have faced, and rank a list of contents (competencies’ needs), desired methodology, training duration, program framework and target population.

After this small groups work, an element from each table will present some conclusions and a general debate will be promoted.

This collective work will contribute to develop a strategy for Smart City Program Managers training activities.

16:30 Opening and Smart City Tech presentation, Mark De Colvenaer

16:40 Key note speaker

17:00 Interactive Session:

                -  Is training necessary? To Whom?

                -  What are the main challenges to a Smart City Program?

                -  How long should it take?

                -  Can it be organized as mainly e-Learning with hands-on session?

                -  Do you see benefit from mixing different cultures, schools and domains (planning, management, ICT, ...)?

18:00 Conclusions and Next Steps (presentation and debate)

18:30 End

JOIN US!!!

This project has received funding from the European Unión COSME COS-Cluster Programme, under the grant agreement Nº 783412