CityWeb Workshop

The GCTC Transportation SuperCluster report to NIST and US Ignite will include a section on the topic of making it easier (faster, cheaper, more interoperable) to create, develop, deploy, and maintain Smart City Applications. Although beginning as a Transportation SuperCluster proposal the need for better software development tooling is transvertical, that is broader than just the Transportation SuperCluster. The goal then is the establishment of a Software Development Toolkit project and community that will support development activities across all the SuperClusters. We envision a single open source community creating and maintaining the SDK (or more properly a collection of interconnected and related SDKs supporting various APIs and development functions. The first draft of this report is due to NIST and US Ignite by the end of April 2017. All the chapters in the eventual report will be written via a combination of key volunteers and general crowdsourcing across the Supercluster participants. The CitySDK chapter will be written here in the wiki.

Below this line is the original wiki entry describing the breakout session at the GCTC workshop held in February 2017 in Portland as well as containing links to the talks presented in the breakout session.

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Writing "Smart City" applications is hard. Often, the software and tooling environment is proprietary and the resulting applications fail to interoperate with applications developed elsewhere. It can also be expensive due to a lack of in-house knowledge, skills and tools for such software. Having an open source Software Development Kit (SDK) that provides libraries, tools and common APIs could be valuable in addressing this problem. The goal would be to make it easier, cheaper and faster to develop, deploy and sustain Smart City applications worldwide.

This is a workshop to discuss the creation of an open source development community and project to build an environment of SDKs and tools towards such a goal.

This aligns with the Federal initiative for a "City Web", which encourages the adoption of common and proven approaches to the Smart City mission. It is hoped that cities and stakeholders coordinate existing activities to share data models, software tools etc. The Federal NITRD program and CITII would be greatly accelerated in that goal by a thriving open source community of developers and users sharing best practices and resources.

We have sent out a brief set of questions regarding interest to all the identified attendees of the Workshop Session. If you are at all interested in participating in the conversation (or even just following what might occur) and haven't received any email from us, please don't hesitate to send Dan a note at daniel.frye@urban.systems. The slides from the workshop have been uploaded and linked to in the Agenda table below.

City SDK Workshop Agenda, 9:45AM Thursday, C-121

NIST	Martin Burns	Smart City SDK and PPI (pptx)
FIWARE	Jose Gonzalez	Fiware (pdf)
urban.systems	Nivedita Singhvi	An Open Source Smart City SDK Proposal (pdf)

Martin Burns - NIST - Martin discusses a NIST program to help with the proliferation of standards.

Jose Gonzalez - FIWARE - Since 2011, FIWARE has stood as an independent community whose mission is to build open and sustainable software platform standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications. The potential of FIWARE for the growth and sustainable development of Smart Cities is already a reality backed by more than 100 cities around the world.

Nivedita Singhvi - urban.systems - A Smart City Open Source SDK Proposal: This talk will present our initial thoughts on what a City SDK open source project might look like, what would be its benefits and scope, and the obstacles, concerns it would need to overcome.

Also of interest would be hearing from any Smart City application developers that might like to present or host a poster on issues they have in building modern Smart City applications.

Feel free to add early ideas and thoughts about this idea here as well.