What we learned from the Connected Smart Cities and Communities Conference 2023
Last week, I had the pleasure to attend the 2023 edition of the Connected Smart Cities and Communities Conference in Brussels. For those not familiar with the event, it is the main annual event of the Open and Agile Smart Cities community to share experiences and set their future direction of travel. Day 1 is a member internal event, mainly focused on their city membership base and supporting member organisations. Day 2 is an open community event with many parallel conference sessions and tracks discussing the state of play in the Smart Cities world. I was lucky to join both days, but I will focus my discussions here on what I have learned from the second day experience.
Networking beats content
As this has been the first physical event since the pandemic, people spent more time talking in the coffee area and corridors, leaving sessions half empty, or shortened to compensate for it. People craved physical conversation and interactions and it felt like a real community coming together after a long time. While it was frustrating for the presenters to lack a bigger audience or be cut short, it was easy to forgive the audience once you saw the deep conversations in the break areas in front of the conference rooms. The sound of a noisy cow bell might have dispersed the crowds quicker into the conference rooms, but we can leave this to the next edition of the event.
Terminology matters
It will take time until the community settles on what the new buzzwords, such as ‘Digital Twins’ or ‘Data Spaces’, really mean to them. Everyone has a slightly different concept based on their point of departure and with what lens they are looking at these technologies to help them solve their problems. It was interesting to see how people discussed the same named concept in their presentations but meant different things. For newbies in the audience, it might have been a very confusing experience at times, for others it is just part of the process until a technology concept gains maturity. However, a good understanding of common terminology is crucial for the community to move forward at pace and share best practices and experiences on how such technologies can really add value.
Digital twins go meta and become social
I was only part of some of the sessions, but speaker definitions of Digital Twins ranged from urban data platforms to 3D city models to complex real-world simulations. While the terminology mismatch does not greatly help foster further understanding, there are emerging trends that I could observe. Initial work on Urban Digital Twins focused more on capturing the real world in digital models. This is now being enhanced by also including social information about citizen and human behaviour. Another emphasis to which Digital Twins are being drawn into is building the bridge to a presence in a pure digital world such as the Metaverse, which brings me to my next buzzword. Over the last year I was trying to largely ignore the metaverse hype, but it was only a matter of time that I could dodge the bullet. While I have been put off by some Metaverse presentations throughout the event, I found the reflections in the final session from Rotterdam really inspiring. In their vision, Digital Urban Communities will emerge in the coming years based on a seamless interaction of the physical reality, social reality and digital reality. The metaverse plays a role in realising the digital reality but the Digital Urban Community is constrained by the locality of Rotterdam, forming a local ecosystem in which a social, physical and digital Rotterdam comes together, and where interactions between social-physical, social-digital and physical-digital become fluid.
Openness needs some choice and not only a single open standard
Another key concept in the OASC community are minimum interoperability mechanisms (MIMs). There is agreement on what MIMs should do and references to some open standards and technologies to implement these, but there seems to be a tussle in parts of the community about the openness of all. A smart city environment brings together users of digital tools and infrastructure from different domains such as traditional IT systems and databases, telecoms, geo-spatial, or Internet of Things systems. The users traditionally work in different communities and are used to standards-based technologies geared towards their communities. The GIS community relies on OGC standards, the web community on W3C based standards and others from the Telco world favour ETSI or TMF standards. While all of these are open standards, there seems to be one faction of the community who wants only one set of standards for the MIMs to rule them all. For others the focus on a single set of standards is too restrictive and defeats the openness of choice they need. My gut feeling here is that for MIMs to be widely adopted across many cities, one must recognise that people who work with data and technology in cities come from different disciplines with different technical cultures and are used to the standards and tools established in their communities. The role of MIMs should be to advocate for a limited set of open standards that represent best practice in their respective domains and communities, while establishing clear links between the chosen sets of standards to encourage higher interoperability across these.
OASC has not lost its global appeal and has gained community feel
Last time I physically attended OASC’s Connected Smart Cities & Communities Conference was in Brussels at the beginning of 2020. The pandemic made physical gatherings much more difficult and the virtual “City x City” festival could only partially replace the good vibes experienced at the physical events. Despite the lack of travel and physical gatherings during this period, it was good to see that OASC has not lost its international appeal. Veteran partners from Japan and new ones from as far as Canada rubbed shoulders with the remaining European crowd, making it a truly international movement. A hastily put together programme and agenda did not put off the crowds to turn up in numbers and make the journey to the event. OASC has now a real community feel and I am looking forward to the next time we meet again.