Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
In today's scene of restrictions and shrinking budgets, the need to identify new ways of collaboration in the provision of services of public interest becomes essential to maintain its quality in European cities. On the other hand, the growing societal demands to open the public information and public goods for its re-use opens new opportunities to explore other ways of offering public services that have been traditionally solely delivered by public administrations.
The iCity project aims at making a step forward in the co-creation of services of public interest by third parties (developers, small and medium enterprises, ... etc.) that are pushing for their space as service providers in the urban spaces of Smart Cities.
The project intends to develop and deploy an approach to allow these interested parties to create, deploy, operate and exploit services based on the use of available public information, digital assets and Opened Information Systems in cities. This represents a shift in the governance of cities and the concept upon which traditional public service delivery has been based.
The iCity project vision makes a step further on the concept of Open Data offering a novel approach of Opened Information Systems where the municipal ICT networks already deployed in urban spaces will be made available and accessible to the general public with the objective of maximizing the number of deployed services of public interest. The services to be finally deployed will be developed by interested third parties who will be given access to public information and Opened Information Systems through a shared technological platform integrated in the four participant cities (Barcelona, Bologna, Genova and London): the iCity platform.
