Amsterdam, June 4, 2015—Today six motivated Dutch cities have signed the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) Letter of Intent to join the 2nd wave, forming OASC NL: Amersfoort, Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Enschede, Rotterdam and Utrecht.

Keeping up with market velocity

Katalin Gallyas is Vice Chair of the Connected Smart Cities Network Board, which oversees the OASC Task Force, and the Board’s contact to OASC NL. She is also Open Innovation Manager at the CTO Office in the City of Amsterdam. Reporting from the signing, she says:

“We are really proud to announce this step as all six cities are very keen to move towards smart interoperable open data-based solutions. I am very inspired to see this unique collaboration where we can, for the first time, openly discuss the pros and cons of some open data platforms dashboards, and we’ll push forward the smartest solutions.”

“It is not only about procuring smartly when it comes to open / big data-based solutions, but also to make sure we are not missing the market velocity when it comes to open data-based city ‘steering’,” says Gallyas.

National events and collaboration

The Dutch cities are meeting bi-monthly and have a technical secretary, hosted by the CTO Office in the City of Amsterdam. The ambition is to promote the ‘intelligence unit’ features of this national collaborative network, and to set up very concrete collaboration projects between the participating cities, applying for common open data funds on a larger scale. National open data-related events and capacity building via MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will be facilitated in and driven by this network. Next meeting in the Dutch OASC NL is 25 june in Utrecht, at 10-12 am.

OASC members and topics will be part of national Open Data and IoT conferences such as the CIO conference in November 2015. Soon a collaboration website will be launched to generate common project and concrete milestones. “We really look forward to take the first harmonised open data steps between the OASC NL member cities,” says Katalin Gallyas. The signees from the six Dutch OASC cities were:

• Amersfoort: Mr. M. Tigelaar, Alderman of the City of Amersfoort.
• Amsterdam: Mr. Ger Baron, CTO, City of Amsterdam.
• Eindhoven: Ms. Mary-Ann Schreurs, Wethouder van Innovatie en Design, Cultuur en Duuzaamheid, City of Eindhoven.
• Enschede: Mr. E. Eerenberg, Alderman of the City of Enschede.
• Rotterdam: Mr. Mark Vermeer, Chief Information Officer, City of Rotterdam.
• Utrecht: Mr. S. Huijsman, Chief Information Officer, City of Utrecht.

Below are more detailed motivations from the cities of Amersfoort and Enschede, adding the perspective of a medium-sized city on the prospective value of the Open & Agile Smart Cities initiative.

Amersfoort

We will support the initiative by publishing Open Data in the data-portals of FIWARE Lab NL and the City of Amersfoort, in order to facilitate standardization of smart city data models following a “driven-by-implementation” approach.

We acknowledge that open data published through the Open & Agile Smart Cities initiative will be made available to cities, communities and developers worldwide for free experimentation based on open licenses.

Specifically, we have already taken decisions which will lead to our support of the Open & Agile Smart Cities implementation principles above:

1. Setting up a FIWARE node in the Netherlands (www.fiware-lab.nl).
2. Setting up of an innovation fund to develop proof of concepts (based on FIWARE) for smart city solutions in cooperation with launching customers.
3. Deliver 5 scalable smart city solutions for launching customers developed in FIWARE Lab NL.
4. Open data will be published through FIWARE Lab NL, which is based on CKAN, and be made available to cities, communities and developers worldwide.

Our commitment brings in the initiative of FIWARE Lab NL. This is a public-private partnership offering a FIWARE-platform and community for Smart City innovation. FIWARE Lab NL fits into the vision and ambition of the Economic Board Utrecht (EBU) and the cities of Utrecht and Amersfoort to strengthen the regional economy by focussing on the theme of Green and Healthy Economy.

FIWARE Lab NL supports organizations in the Netherlands  to find innovative solutions to societal issues by offering low-barrier access to industry expertise in the field of digital service innovation. It provides participating organisations with optimal support structures for successful digital services development. This includes access to open data, API-platforms, test beds, living labs, fiber optic networks, funds, education and training and business development support.

Central to the FIWARE Lab NL approach is the involvement of ‘launching customers’: regional organisations that want to contract industry partners to co-create innovative Smart City solutions. FIWARE Lab NL  supports these organizations by forming public-private partnerships to find new concepts, new business models, and ways to successfully get new services at their disposal. Last but not least, FIWARE Lab NL supports to find ways for market rollout.

Key to the success of FIWARE Lab NL is that the EBU and the Cities of Utrecht and Amersfoort are actively involved in mobilizing launching customers to articulate their needs to industry partners. This is done through new ways of procurement. Involving launching customers ensures need-driven innovation as well as a flying start towards commercial launch of new applications. The FIWARE Lab NL activities are based on a generic and holistic approach to accelerate the transformation of ideas into proof-of-concepts and prepare these for ready-for-market introduction.

Further information:

Further information on Amersfoort’s FIWARE Lab Node.

Enschede

1. Motivation for participating in the OASC network

With around 160.000 inhabitants, the City of Enschede is the largest city in the Province of Overijssel located in the East of Netherlands. Enschede is part of a larger agglomeration of 600.000 citizens. The

City of Enschede is strongly interested to participate in the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) network for several reasons:

Enschede expects to benefit from and contribute to the mission of this OASC network to

stimulate the further development and validation of a common set of standards, data models and open data platforms for smart cities. Enschede welcomes to initiate and/or contribute to open data and smart city projects, which are realizing these goals.

Enschede also highly welcomes to participate in the Dutch OASC network in order to exchange information and knowledge and to collaboratively develop and implement open data and smart city projects in The Netherlands.

2. Policy and commitment

The City of Enschede was among the very first cities in The Netherlands to adopt Open Data. The Open Data Platform provides access to three types of datasets: administratative data (in standards HTML, JSON, XML, CSV, TSV, TAG), geographical data, and references to other datasets. Additionally there are several open standards enabling access to the datasets.

The City of Enschede also endorses ambitious policy objectives towards becoming a Smarter City. In this respect, the key policy objective is to decrease energy consumption (mobility, building management) and achieve substantial CO2 reduction. As of 2013, Enschede is partner in the Green Deal ͞Smart Energy Cities͟, jointly with cities of Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Arnhem and Groningen.

The objective is to develop and implement smart sustainable energy technologies. Key application areas of interest for the City of Enschede from the perspective of open data and smart cities include renewal of city open spaces, tourism, mobility and traffic management, government-citizen services, event management, and other. To realize these objectives, the City of Enschede closely collaborates with Saxion University of Applied Sciences as well as with University of Twente. The aim is to continue and strengthen this collaboration in order to develop and implement innovative smart city projects. The City of Enschede commits to support innovative smart city projects e.g. and to support applications for EU regional funding. The City of Enschede is also willing to participate in innovative smart city projects as a public organization.

Projects and initiatives in Open Data for Smarter Cities OPEN DOORS. City of Enschede works together with Saxion University and with other cities in

Eastern Netherlands on Open Data for Smart Cities (OPEN DOORS). In this initiative, CitySDK andFIWARE tools are being used for the storage of and access to open data, using appropriate APIs. Within this project, services, applications and visualizations are being developed to be implemented in several  East Netherlands’ Cities in order to create a larger market for deǀelopers

OPEN DOOR will enable developers to make more easily use of the opportunities of open data. The plan for 2015 is to 2 implement the necessary technical infrastructure based on CitySDK and FIWARE, to input relevant data into the platform and to develop two or more applications for citizens or professionals based on the data. The longer term goal is to establish the infrastructure to be used by communities of developers and users to develop and test societal services. Results will be used in various projects and initiatives e.g. inner city innovation projects in the City of Enschede and the Local OpenGovernment Lab (City of Deventer) SMART. The SMART initiative promotes the idea of urban sensing in using mobile phones as sensors in the city environment and to combine sensory information with information generated by infrastructures (traffic and mobility management). The goal of this project is to stimulate sustainable forms of mobility behavior and increase urban attractiveness. SMART app has been developed by Novay, Saxion, City of Enschede and other parties within the European project SUNSET. This app is already working and provides open mobility data An inter-regional (Dutch-German) collaboration based on the SUNSET platform is currently in development (NetMobil, Interreg).