Mission and objectives
In smart and resilient cities, we create data spaces that affect our social and physical environments. In this Task Group we wish to focus on mobility and the capacity of smart mobility services to gain value, by modeling spatial behaviors, and developing a decentralized mobility system, based on an informational framework. On-demand mobility with autonomous vehicles is expected to increase traffic loads and unequal access to transport services. We wish to design mechanisms to reduce the environmental, social, and economic costs of traffic inefficiencies — while enhancing social cohesion, community building and environmental caring. Mobility is, however, only one layer in our social life. As governments are building online information environments for research, Open Government Data (OGP) and big data aimed at actual policy making, and industry needs, should adopt and develop data schemes. What are the data schemes that best align with social, environmental and economic welfare (SDGs; AI4Covid), industry innovation, and also address privacy concerns – this is a topic to discuss and promote. For that purpose of “Towards Paradigm Shift for Open Data in Planning Smart and Resilient Cities”, we are seeking to facilitate data sharing, opening governmental data, while creating a universal crowdsourcing platform, cross-border, and independent of governments. This task group will understand the data sharing policies which are in place globally and locally and identify the gap in them. Opening up the data has been very challenging especially when it comes to government data for cities. This task group shall work as an advocate and help the government agencies to identify the ways in which they can adopt the open data policy for various domains which are important to make the cities resilient and also suggest mechanisms for giving incentives for the data contributors. We believe this is achievable by enabling big data tools to clean and optimize data, and to open data sources for the public.
This task group shall also focus on studying the global data sharing policies and identifying the gaps, and recommending the good practices for open data to make cities resilient. As cities are dynamic phenomena, it is extremely important to have planned cities and have a good data repository that can help in making better lives. This task group will understand and analyze the best practices to enhance data sharing to improve the cities’ decision-making. The study shall include the SWOT analysis of the data sharing policies, which have been adopted globally to build digital twins of megacities and carve out the best practices which can be adopted by developing nations to move efficiently towards opening up the government data. Additionally, this task group may eventually evolve into a consultation entity, available to institutions during their decision-making processes regarding prioritizing specific tasks for opening up their data and developing open data policy. Finally, our task group intends to address a new and unexpected type of open data solutions and its potential.
Significance
As we move ahead with technology, we have noticed that massive data is being collated in all the sectors. Building digital twins, integrating data from various sources have been the focus to make better cities. To head towards this direction, it is extremely important for a country to have a standard data sharing policy for all the urban sectors to make the process of opening up the data smoother.
Impact
- ·Bring together the policy documents of open data in various countries and good data sharing practices and use.
- Advocate the paradigm shift of making the government data more open to making cities resilient and smart.
Planned activities and outputs for 2021-2023:
- The group shall focus on writing a white paper with the best practices of open data policy for the urban sector (health, transport, education, civic amenities, urban agriculture, urban forestry, etc.);
- Preparation of Annotated Bibliography/ Webliography; Guideline Document on Open Data in Resilient and Smart Cities (for adopting best data sharing policy and data flow mechanisms);
- Advocacy Toolkits for Open Data in Resilient and Smart Cities; Documentation/ mapping of best practices; A Roadmap for the civic communities and governments for opening up their data;
- Webinar series on the role of open data while planning Smart and Resilient Cities;
- Online/offline Workshop/ Consultation event on open data policy with experts in urban sector from various countries;
- Online/offline Interviews among 20 policymakers\ officials\ researchers on: National open data initiatives – before\ after opening, data integration in cities;
- An open report to support the national open data initiatives – keeping it open, safe, and harmonized for data integration, flexibility, and innovation.
Contacts
Co-chairs:
- Ronit Purian: Tel Aviv University and the Public Knowledge Workshop – Hasadna, Israel
- Anup Kumar Das: Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; E: anup_csp[@]jnu.ac.in
- Sridhar Gutam: ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru, India
- Shaily Gandhi: Manager IT & Geospatial Solutions, CEPT Research & Development Foundation (CRDF), India
TG Secretary:
- Ronit Purian: Tel Aviv University and the Public Knowledge Workshop – Hasadna, Israel