Today’s Leicester Smart City Community Reporter planning session at Solvers Studio, was a full day of thinking and testing ideas and assumptions about what we can do to help people in Leicester understand what a smart city is, and how it might affect the services that they use. With expert guidance from Carl Quinn, we had a deep dive into the challenge of finding creative and engaging ways to help people understand a complex topic of real concern.
We started by summarising what we’d learnt over the last week since our previous session. High on our list of observations and concerns is the need for our fellow citizens in Leicester to understand what a smart city is, and to have a clear awareness of how their personal data is being collected, how it is being used, who has access to this data, and what the link is between the public use of that data and the commercial use of that data might be.
This got us thinking about how we might engage with people and communities so that they can contribute to an informed conversation about life in a smart city, which we can then share as a podcast or as a radio programme. What must we do to create a trusted environment that allows people to make a positive contribution to an open and emergent discussion about life in a smart city?
We wanted to use this session today to try to figure out if it is possible to create a framework that can facilitate public engagement in a way that is inclusive, encourages participation, and allows people to enjoy sharing their insights and experiences?
Our challenge is to put on a public engagement session on the 20th September that brings a group of invited guests together to discuss what living in a smart city means to them. With careful guidance from Carl, we had a couple of hours to think through what questions we might want to explore, what games or activities we’d like to use, and how we can use media to capture our guest’s on-the-fly thoughts as part of the process of public engagement.
There are many issues tied up with smart cities thinking, and we needed some time to unpack them and to try to anticipate what we think our participants would like to experience, and what they would like to achieve. We agreed that we can’t answer every possible question, and that we can anticipate the needs of the people for whom Leicester is the embodiment of a smart city because it is where they live or work or study.
We wanted to put ourselves in the minds of people who are facing these challenges in similar ways to ourselves. Are we each searching for happiness, satisfaction, wellbeing? If we accept the hype in the media about smart cities, then this is what we might assume is the same for everyone. A life organised for us using AI, data and superfast communications.
We recognised, however, that there is a long list of social objectives that we could discuss, but that for the purpose of our event, we only need to narrow this down to one aspect. As Carl explained, there is a time for convergent questions and a time for divergent questions, we just need to work out when is the appropriate time to ask them.
Smart cities, if all the hype is to be believed, can potentially enrich our social experience by adding to what it means to be a citizen. But this is dependent, we discussed, on having the right kind of infrastructure in place, so that residents and people who use public services in Leicester can do so reliably. This will probably involve a massive process of managing data and assessing what that data is telling us about our shared human experiences. This then implies that we need a robust and appropriate measurement and evaluation set of tools, which can demonstrate clear lessons for policymakers, businesses and citizens alike.
We considered that a smart city might, however, simply be a mirror to society,
