CityWeb Workshop

Writing "Smart City" applications is hard. Often, the software and tooling environment is proprietary and the resulting applications fail to inter-operate 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.

Our workshop-style open meeting will discuss next steps with those interested in this effort. If you are interested in attending the workshop (will which occur on the morning of February 2, 9:45 am, location TBD) please indicate interest on the Google Form survey. If you are interested enough in the topic to help organize please send email to daniel.frye@urban.systems.

Current proposed speakers/discussion leaders:

Martin Burns - NIST - 20 minutes

Jose Gonzalez - FIWARE - 20 minutes - 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.

Speaker TBD - One of the Reverse Pitch Speakers from Day 1 may be asked to expound on development issues in this slot

Nivedita Singhvi - urban.systems - 20 minutes - City 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

Open Discussion - panel format - 25 minutes

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.