2018 OASC Ireland – Advancing Solutions
The fourth annual General Assembly Open Agile Smart Cities Ireland (OASC.ie) expo and workshop took place at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at NUI Galway. This year the focus was on explaining how to build a smart city by taking an International Standards Approach with solid expertise and validated experiences from European Living labs which have transformed into a local ecology for innovation involving citizens, services, technologies and policy.
Collaboration
At this OASC.ie annual meeting stakeholders in Galway City and the North-West Region came together to coordinate the strategies and activities that are in place in order to build a Smart Region that serves as pathway between the local region in the West of Ireland through the Smart Atlantic Way and the Galway Connected Hub (the smart city initiative) that signed up to OASC.org, together with Smart City Dublin and Smart Gateway Cork, back in 2015. It is only by collaborating with other cities and regions in Ireland and then connecting onwards with other cities and regions in Europe and right across the world through the OASC.org network that best practices can be defined and thus the use of technology and data will act as the enabler to build a better, more efficient “Connected” society.
Co-Creation Activity in Galway
This year a co-creation workshop ran during the second part of the meeting taking the 50 BEST Smart Cities Award approach for reproducing smart Living Labs in Ireland and explaining the best practices to the city stakeholder attendees. According to Mr Niall O’Brolchain (General chair of OASC.ie ) and Dr. Martin Serrano (Technical manager and board member at OASC.org), this workshop is a success for the west region of the country and the next immediate action is to visit other cities in Ireland and aim to replicate the co-creative experience to align vision and activities across the country. A smart city is a city with the latest technology; it engages with cutting edge research and academia; it has industries and entrepreneurs innovating on the streets; its governance is flexible and makes it easy to adapt to the dynamics of the city. But a smart city is also one with the participation of the citizens at its heart. When these four elements come together, that is termed the quadruple Helix for Innovating in Modern Smart Cities.
Participation
The participants at the co-creation workshop from the North Western regions and Smart City Galway officers at the 2018 OASC Ireland Progress meeting – Insight Galway City this year were proactively identifying the requirements to make Galway City Smarter using a group technique facilitated by OASC.ie
Please look at the [2018 OpenIoT Summer School Activities Program] or visit the [OpenIoT Website] for more details.