The City of Dublin, Ohio, USA, is a city of 50,000 residents. Under the leadership of its Chief Information Officer, Doug McCollough it has been one of the first to launch a publicly owned fibre optic networks and also a digital identity project built on the blockchain. Join us in this exciting podcast to hear how Doug is ensuring that the City of Dublin not only doesn’t get disrupted but is also at the vanguard of innovation.

Dublin is a small city, really a suburb on the northwest corner of Columbus, Ohio. Dough really loves municipalities and is into smart cities, smart mobility, blockchain and all kinds of emerging technology and how they can help public sector organisations.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a technology, infrastructure or innovation that combines existing technologies like databases, peer to peer networks, encryption, distributed computing algorithms, to form a different way of distributing compute, data storage and data security.

In its most basic form, it works by recording pieces of data into blocks that exist with a chain. The chain becomes more resilient every time new blocks are added to it. For Doug the most important thing to him is that as an infrastructure it is superior to other databases, networks, or distributed computing models. Especially for data transactions. It tracks what happened, when, where and with whom.

 

 

City of Dublin, Ohio, USA

The City of Dublin, Ohio, USA, is a small community of 50,000. In spite of it’s size the city has a Chief Information Officer, a role which is usually reserved for very large cities like Boston, New York or Los Angeles. Most cities have an IT director whose job is to keep the technology running, not necessarily to envision what’s new and what’s new.

A few years ago, under Doug’s leadership, the City of Dublin started its path towards innovation by developing one of the first publicly owned fibre optic networks, called Dublink Broadband. Since then the city has earned a reputation of being techno centric as it embraces utilising technology to advance its economic development interests.

The city has the Global Institute for the Study of the Intelligent Community. The institute was established to help share what the City of Dublin has learned about intelligent communities and smart city development, and share those lessons with other communities. They aim to be a kind of conduit and light in showing how communities can use technology to improve the lives of their citizens.

 

Cities being disrupted

Today cities around the world are facing an unprecedent amount of challenges:

* There’s a declining and degrading trust in government which extends to cities

* Cities’ residents are increasingly concerned by a dangerous data privacy environment which can have a negative impact on cities and public transactions

* Budgetary constraints along with innovation around automation and bots have led to government bodies letting go of staff which in turn disrupts the service models that service people

Another core challenge is that cities themselves run the risk of being disrupted by digital native companies.

If cities do not innovate they will be disrupted like any other business.

Google Waze and Google Maps are more often used for information on which roads to travel on instead of government.