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Notes from Meetup #7: Tech and the City - Part 2
I’ve had to split up this edition’s write up as the number of talk videos this month break Tumblr’s “5 embedded videos per post” limit. Please see part one for background info about the event, an update from the Things Network Sheffield meeting and talks from Ben Atha, Stephen Elliott, Jonny Douglas and Fabio Ciravegana.
Here are the remaining four talks, followed by some thoughts about the year and looking ahead to 2018.
Steve Jubb: The Urban Flows Observatory’s Sensor Challenge competition
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Steve is Technical Manager of the Urban Flows Observatory at the University of Sheffield (see our February and July editions for more background on UFlO), and provided us with details on the observatory’s first innovation competition. They will be running one of these in each of the three years of the project, and this first one is intended to get new kinds of data in to the observatory.
The winning entry will receive £4k worth of kit to develop “a prototype to capture data (e.g. a sensor, sensor network or another novel way to capture digital data) about how energy and resources flow through the city.”
They are looking for expressions of interest to be received before Xmas (so get entries in quick). Their website hasn’t yet been launched, at least not at time of writing, but you can find out more about the competition along with the form to declare your expression of interest at UFlO’s twitter account.
David Oliver: Public Wifi and the DCMS Local Full Fibre Networks Challenge Fund
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David Oliver is a Solutions Architect at Sheffield City Council, and was finally able to announce that the Public WiFi contract has been signed off (hooray!) and IDAQ Networks will be the provider. He outlined the parameters of the roll out (pretty much as Mark Gannon did back in September, but we weren’t able to publish the video at the time). One important thing to note is that there will be a city app developed alongside the WiFi, which will a) be open source and b) is intended to provide a jumping off point for other applications and services - like an app-store for the city (if you will).
Much more on this to follow in the new year, I’m sure!
In addition to the WiFi project, David also provided an outline of the DCMS Full Fibre bid which is currently underway.
Sam Chapman: Funding opportunities and getting the community to bid
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Sam Chapman is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at The Floow, the Sheffield-based telematics firm who are also one of Tech Nation’s Future 50 cohort, which tracks the most promising late-stage startups in the country. Sam wanted to direct our attention to a number of funding opportunities and encourage the community to collaborate on bids, as we are missing out on opportunities as a region and not securing as much investment as other comparable cities in the UK.
Sam particularly wanted to draw our attention to the ERDF funded “Sheffield City Region – Integrated Actions for Sustainable Urban Development” fund which has nearly £9m allocated to the region, with deadlines for calls on the 12 January and end of March next year? The Sheffield City Region did advertise for projects back at the beginning of November, but Is anyone bidding for this money, or aware of a bid? Because we’ll lose it if not.
The second opportunity Sam referred to is the upcoming GovTech Catalyst which is opening next year and will have a £20m fund to support innovations in government tech.
Chris Dymond: SmartSheffield News.
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Finally, I presented the usual SmartSheffield News segment, to highlight some of the other things that have happened recently.
Firstly, on the IoT front, in addition to the Things Network Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam’s Things Connected partnership, Siemens and the University of Sheffield have opened a new innovation space in the Diamond building called the MindSphere Lounge, around Siemens’ industrial IoT platform; and Barnsley Digital Media Centre have launched the IoT Tribe North accelerator programme for internet of things startups.
The main thing I spoke about, though, was the recent Digital Conference, and the plans for Sheffield’s Digital Coalition, which is going to be branded dotSHF. As Mark Gannon outlined back in September, this is essentially a coalition of digital leaders across the city who are involved in applying technology to developing Sheffield’s capabilities across seven domains: People, Living, Economy, Mobility, Governance, Resources and Infrastructure.
While the conference was really the first experiment in bringing this coalition together to engage with the challenges and opportunities in these seven areas (and the various sub-domains within them), 2018 will see much more of this activity, and will hopefully begin to accelerate Sheffield’s digital development using an open, flexible framework of cooperation and information sharing. As those who attended the conference will know, this is underpinned by a series of Trello boards, one for each of the domains, which members of the coalition are encouraged to use to record and track projects and useful information for the benefit of the whole community.
This was the 7th SmartSheffield meetup event Matt Proctor and I have run together, the 5th this calendar year. Our intention from the outset was to try to achieve four things:
Bring a community of people together who have an interest and a stake in Sheffield’s development as a smart city.
Provide a forum for local businesses, the public sector and academia to present their plans and projects, get feedback and encourage engagement.
Build the profile of those projects amongst the wider tech and community and further.
Encourage the community to develop more impactful project concepts and bid for funds to realise them.
I think we have certainly managed to achieve the first two of those things and touched on the others, but I think there is still a lot more to do to make the wider tech community aware of what is going on around these topics, let alone the general public.
And I think we have, as yet, barely scratched the surface of what we can achieve together when we put our minds to it and collaborate outside of the events.
That said, this year has seen a significant step up in the volume and quality of smart city activity in Sheffield, and in the attention it has received, and we are looking forward to continuing to push the agenda forward next year enormously!
So huge thanks to Arup, without who's support we couldn't make this event what it is, and a massive thank you also to everyone who has engaged, supported and contributed to SmartSheffield this year, have an excellent Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2018 :)
Chris Dymond
Sheffield Digital and Unfolding
Matt Proctor
Arup
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We held the first Things Network Sheffield meeting on May 31st. The Things Network is a global community that are developing community-owned, city-wide Internet of Things networks (using the LoRaWAN protocol) in their towns and cities. These networks will allow anyone who wants to to experiment with these technologies, and measure things in their own environments.
Please get in touch if you’re interested in getting involved - we need organisations to host or sponsor gateways (they cost 300 euros each), and learn how to build applications on the infrastructure too.
Check it out here.
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Tweeted
Fantastic line-up for the inaugural Sheffield IoT Meetup on Wednesday 2 Oct from 6:30pm: #1 An Introduction to #IoT in Sheffield @Pitch_In_IoT @Totallysecure @IotTribe @SmartSheffield @SHFDigital @dotSHF 🤓 https://t.co/A7zZkl5QlO
— Ceri Batchelder (@ceribatchelder) September 30, 2019
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Notes from Meetup #7: Tech and the City - Part 1
(This edition’s write up is split into two separate posts in order to get around Tumblr’s 5 embedded videos per post limit - we had a lot of talks at this one :)
The December 2017 edition of the SmartSheffield meetup was probably our biggest to date, with tickets selling out over a week before the event, people on the waitlist and 8 speakers. We nearly finished all the pizza this time!! (Thanks Arup as ever for laying on such a generous spread :)
The talks were definitely shorter and more succinct this time, but with so much to get through it was still a squeeze to be finished by 9pm. We’ll continue to tweak and improve, but it’s also a measure of how much activity there now is going on across the city, and the popularity of our event, that there is more and more content to get through. And some of the topics cannot be covered in just a few minutes, so it’s all good.
There was also much talk around funding bids again, which is good to note. Unfortunately the planned 5g testbed bid workshop that was planned for November didn’t happen in the end, but we still very much want to arrange monthly open bid workshops to alternate with the meetup proper. We’ll look to see whether we can get one booked in for January, with the next meetup pencilled in for Monday February 5th.
We also, as per usual, organised a meeting of the Sheffield Things Network before the meetup, which was excellently attended. And with Things Network LoRaWAN gateways now being shipped, we��re confident there will be a significant network up and running in Sheffield by the Spring. I should also note that the Sheffield Honey Company have put the first Gateway in the field (well done Jez Daughtry!) and also that Sheffield Hallam University have teamed up with the Digital Catapult and have commissioned a Things Connected LoRaWAN gateway in the city centre, so we now have two IoT platforms to play around with, as well as the SigFox network which WNDUK is also rolling out.
Speaking of which, I should point readers at the Urban Flows Observatory’s first innovation competition, which is focussed on building a prototype to capture new data. There more about this in Steve Jubb’s talk below, but the deadline is very short, and it’s worth highlighting here - so get you’re expressions of interest tout suite.
Right, now without further ado, here are the talks from the event:
Ben Atha: Smart kiosks and transparent screens
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Ben Atha is the director of Milk Lab, a creative design agency based at the Electric Works, and in Istanbul, which specialises in applying interactive technologies for advertising. Ben explains how the company has been developing smart kiosks for retail applications, that could also find uses in cities, and also how new transparent OLED screen technologies are making new kinds of static augmented reality applications possible, which also have potential applications in cities.
Stephen Elliot: Location-based apps for cultural heritage and behaviour change
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Stephen is the founder and CEO of Llama Digital a Sheffield agency that specialises in location based applications and experiences, and were one of the first agencies to explore and exploit bluetooth beacons.
Stephen introduced us to two of their applications:
Situate, which allows museums, galleries and other cultural heritage organisations to create their own location-based tours and experiences, giving ‘non-technical’ curators the ability to easily manage their visitors’ digital experience of the physical location.
Bicycle Island - an app developed for the Isle of Wight, designed to encourage people to cycle along the route between Cowes and Newport in order to promote a healthier lifestyle and reduce congestion along the route. It’s a gamified active travel app, that engages cyclists in a collective effort to beat monthly distance targets in order to unlock charitable donations to local causes, and shows what can be done by building bespoke interaction on top of Llama’s underlying .Situate engine and backend.
Jonny Douglas: Update on Mount Pleasant and Avenues to Zero project
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Back in July, Pennie Raven introduced us to the plans for the development of the Mount Pleasant estate in Sharrow, and the Avenues to Zero project that presents a holistic vision of a community where living, working and play are all integrated. This time her business partner Jonny Douglas presented us with an update on the project and how the SmartSheffield community can get involved.
Fabio Ciravegna: A Data Ecosystem Proposal to Model Sheffield City Region Mobility Patterns
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Fabio is Professor of Language and Knowledge Technology at the University of Sheffield’s Computer Science Department. He is also a co-founder of successful University spin-outs The Floow and K-NOW. Fabio has a proposal to bring data together from a number of sources across the city region in order to analyse movement and transport patterns. He also raises important points about how the city should be doing more to enabling projects like this, and how the SmartSheffield community can play a role in reducing the friction.
Please check out part two for talks by Steve Jubb, David Oliver, Sam Chapman and I (Chris Dymond).
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Announcing SmartSheffield #13 - Something in the Air
We’re very happy indeed to announce that the SmartSheffield meetup is returning for a new run of events on Monday the 2nd September!
We’ve secured new sponsorship from Ove Arup Group, Pitch-In Project at the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Digital (and have one more gold-level sponsorship slot open, as well as Silver tiers, so please get in touch if you would like to partner with us!)
This should allow us to run another six events over the next twelve months, scheduled for the 1st Monday every two months starting in September at Arup, and alternating between sponsor venues (Pitch-In will be hosting in the MindSphere Lounge in the Diamond Building).
The first event back will focus on Air Quality and the various initiatives that are currently in play to measure and address the problem in Sheffield.
Speakers will be announced on Twitter and in the Eventbrite listing as and when they confirm, meanwhile register early while there are still plenty of tickets!
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Notes from Meetup #6: Coalitions of the Willing
The September SmartSheffield meetup was held on Monday the 11th September, and was the sixth(!) meetup of the ‘modern era’, i.e. since Arup came on board as hosts and sponsors last October.
It’s probably time to take stock of what we’ve done so far and where we’d like to go next, but frankly we’ve little time for such naval gazing! Suffice to say that Matt and I always review each event afterwards, and our feeling is that the event is growing and becoming more significant to Sheffield’s emerging digital strategy (more about which later in this recap), that it’s attracting people from more diverse organisations, and has a good balance of technologists, business people and policy makers. One thing we would like is to convert all this interest and activity into more bids for project funding, so we’re thinking of hosting bid workshops in between the main by-monthly meetups. Please let us know if you think this would be a good idea!
We’ll also continue to tweak the format slightly - for instance we’re going to set stricter limits on talk length from the next edition onwards: we’re thinking a 10 minute maximum talk length, no more than 5 slides, and a max 5 minute Q&A afterwards. With so much to discuss, and the event attracting talks on so many active projects in the city, we are in danger of losing valuable networking time unless we set stricter limits!
Anyway, that’s enough self-reflection for now, here’s a recap of all the talks and news from last Monday. As always, the videos, presentations and any other supporting documents are also available in Trello, where you can also comment specifically on the topics discussed.
Mark Gannon: Building a Digital Coalition for Sheffield
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This is probably the most important talk we’ve had at SmartSheffield so far, in that it’s the first detailed public expression of the city’s overarching approach to the digital agenda, across many smart city domains. Mark, who is Director of Information Systems and Business Change at Sheffield City Council, explains the intention to build a coalition of digital leaders across the city who are active in a range of domains, and how this coalition can be brought together and encouraged to collaborate and self-organise.
Sheffield is building a reputation for taking quite a holistic approach to the smart city agenda (for instance the report ‘Smart-Eco Cities in the UK: Trends and City Profiles, 2016’ says “Sheffield’s concept of the ‘smart’ is experimental in its openendedness”. Which is nice.) and the ‘Digital Coalition’ strategy that Mark outlines continues in that vein with the intention to nurture groups of people who are active in digital development and innovation across many different aspects of importance to the city, and not just those directly under the auspices of the council.
Please watch and read the presentation for the low down, but in a nutshell the plan covers the following aspects:
The opportunity (why should we do anything?)
Who is the ‘we’?
What domains, and subdomains, should the coalition cover?
How could the coalition assess progress?
How can it be challenge-driven?
What behaviours and capabilities should we foster?
How should it be governed and organised?
What’s happening next?
If you’re quick, there is an opportunity to discuss the plan in more detail on Thursday the 21st September at the Digital Policy Conflab event at The Workstation from 6pm till 8pm. This event is hosted by Sheffield City Council and Creative Sheffield, in collaboration with Sheffield Digital, and you can find out more about it and register here: https://digitalpolicyconflab3.eventbrite.co.uk
Lee Mullin: Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the smart city
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Lee Mullin is a specialist in Digital & Building Information Modelling for Construction at Autodesk, and provided an excellent tour of the technologies, applications and opportunities provided by BIM and how it connects to other smart city agendas such as movement monitoring, sensor networks, city operations centres and observatories, etc.
In addition, Autodesk are looking for collaborations to extend their core BIM technologies into new areas such as social care and infrastructure monitoring, as well as modelling. You can find out more about their BIM technologies here and/or get in touch with Lee directly.
Neal Forse: WND's national Sigfox roll out
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Neal is co-founder and CEO of Wireless Network Developments UK (WND UK), who have taken over the contract to roll out Sigfox across the country from Arqiva (whom we heard from back in February). Neal’s approach to the roll out is very different, as they have substantially changed the cost/quality/speed equation, which, along with being venture finance-supported, has opened up different business model options for them. They are now looking for installation partners and will provide free access to the network for any building or estate owners that come on board. This approach seems much more scaleable, and brings Sigfox more firmly into play for SMEs and innovation projects.
Get in touch with them at their website, or via Twitter if you’re interested in hosting a gateway, or partnering on an IoT application with them.
Chris Dymond: SmartSheffield News
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Finally, I presented my regular slot highlighting things that have come to my attention in the Sheffield ‘scene’ recently. Here’s what I covered:
Superfast South Yorkshire Vouchers
This was really just a reminder that funding is available from SFSY both for broadband connectivity, up to £2,500 match via their Connection Vouchers, and for new innovations that use it, up to £12,500 match via their Innovation Vouchers.
This could be a great, local source of funding for smart city experiments, and we should look to take advantage of them!
All the details about them are here.
The Sheffield Things Network
There was a meeting of the Things Network (the 3rd one) before the main meetup. This network is coordinating the effort to develop a community-owned and operated LoRaWAN network across Sheffield and the surrounding areas. A full write up of the meeting will be published to the Things Network Sheffield community page, meanwhile here are some highlights:
Chesterfield Things Network have commissioned a single-channel gateway for testing.
Scott and Cullen have nearly finished building their gateway.
Craig Pickles has also built a single channel gateway.
Hive IT have a TNS gateway on order.
Uflo are keen to work out a way to include Things Network gateways in their plans, perhaps incorporated into the planned weather stations, perhaps part-funded by innovation vouchers from Superfast South Yorkshire.
In addition, Steve Jubb at Uflo has an opportunity to put a TNS gateway on the roof of the Arts Tower, alongside a WND Sigfox gateway when it is installed in the next couple of weeks.
There may also be opportunities to incorporate TNS gateways into SCC social housing upgrade work.
Shmapped
Shmapped is an app developed by the Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust in conjunction with the University of Sheffield. It “invites users to map the good things about Sheffield’s green and built spaces.”, and is part of the “Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN) project run by the Universities of Derby and Sheffield.
It looks like a really interesting data gathering exercise. The app can be downloaded from the AppStore or Google Play (just search for “Shmapped”, obviously), and you can find out more about the project here.
Coulomb
Coulomb is a Facebook Messenger application developed by longtime SmartSheffield collaborator Stuart “Stubbs” Grimshaw. Coulomb is designed as an information service for drivers of plug-in electric vehicles and hybrids, and allows them to register their cars and when they are using public charging points. Doing so “helps you find the owner of that EV that's finished charging when you're low on juice and need to be on the road.”
The app is available via Facebook. And Stuart has also written about why he created it.
Active 10
Active 10 is a wellbeing app that has been developed as part of Public Health England’s “One You” initiative and in conjunction with the University of Sheffield. Active 10 is essentially a fitness tracker and motivator, but designed for people who are currently extremely inactive. It encourages users to perform at least one brisk 10 minute walk each day, and shows them how they are progressing.
It’s another in a burgeoning line of health and wellbeing apps that are being designed and developed in Sheffield, as the medical, life sciences, sports science and wellbeing research continue to collaborate.
You can download Active 10 from the AppStore or Google Play (search for “One You Active 10”), and you can find out more about it here.
KNOWING
KNOWING is a research project currently getting started at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, which aims to better understand “the KNOWledge politics of experimentING with smart urbanism” (KNOWING, see? Very clever!).
The project (actually, it’s an Open Research Area, which is a common platform for bidding for research projects as collaborations between certain European countries - meaning it will consist of multiple projects all with a common theme and motivation) intends to look at 8 European cities (Sheffield, Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg, Eindhoven, Den Haag, Toulouse and Lyon) and compare their smart city and urban innovation efforts to see how they are shaping and re-shaping “urban knowledge politics”.
Which a) is fascinating and means that we potentially have a great way of connecting with urban innovators in those other cities; and b) means that, yes, we are being closely observed and monitored…
Hopefully Rachel, Aiden or Simon from the UI will be able to come and tell us more about it at a future meetup.
Meanwhile, there is a website in the process of being created to collate it’s activities, and an article about it all here.
BIN@Sheffield 2017
BIN stands for Business Innovation Network, and is “an informal international network of academic and industry partners engaged and supporting the creation of a sustainable forum for sharing good practice and opportunities in Innovation”, involving the Universities of Sheffield, Porto and Sao Paulo. It is designed to bring academics, researchers and businesses together to share knowledge and discuss what’s going on at the edge of research and technology. They host an annual conference which alternates between the three partners, and this year it is Sheffield’s turn once again.
The overarching theme this year is ‘Digitalisation’, with a particular focus on three strands: Health and Wellbeing, Industrial Digitisation and, of particular interest to us, Smart cities & mobility.
Here are details about the conference and registration.
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That’s it for another month. The next event will most likely be Monday the 6th November at the usual place and time. Please let me know if you spot anything that you think I should cover in SmartSheffield News, and let me know if you’d like a speaking slot - as I mentioned in the intro we’re going to limit slots to 10 minutes presentation (max 5 slides) and 5 mins Q&A from now on, you have been warned! :)
You can reach me at [email protected], or @SmartSheffield on Twitter.
Thanks again to everyone for coming along and getting involved!
Cheers,
Chris Dymond
#SmartSheffield#smartcities#Shefffield City Council#Urban Innovation#urban institute#Sigfox#WND#Autodesk#BIM#LoRaWAN#IoT#thingsnetwork#HealthTech
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Notes from the Meetup #5: Networks on Networks...
On Monday the 3rd July, we once again gathered at Arup’s cafe and presentation area at the top of 3 St Paul’s Place, to meet, chat and hear about developments in the local smart city ‘scene’. Thanks everyone for coming, once again it was a sell out and the event keeps getting bigger and better thanks to you. The next event will likely be on Monday the 11th September - sign up to the mailing list and/or watch social media to find out when it’s confirmed.
Below are are the highlights and videos from our excellent speakers. And as always, the videos, presentations and other supporting documents are available in Trello, where you can also comment in detail on the topics.
Andy Curtis: Knowledge Transfer Network
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Andy Curtis is Knowledge Transfer Manager for the Digital Economy at the government’s Knowledge Transfer Network. The KTN is the government agency responsible for helping to connect people together in order to create new projects, products, services and businesses. Andy’s talk covered the many ways in which funding support could available for smart city-related projects. Note that some of them are grant funding (i.e. 100%) which others are competition funding (so usually provide between 40% and 70% of the necessary funding, leaving the applicant or consortium to find the rest). Also note that it is not the case that UK projects are ineligible for European funding, or will be looked on unfavourably - UK applications are being treated as ‘business as usual’ despite Brexit.
Here are the potential funding sources Andy mentioned in his talk:
Science and Technology Facility Council
- looking especially for ideas that could disrupt industry.
Engineering and Physical Science Research Council
Grant Finder
- The KTN has a license for this, contact Andy if you’d like access!
European Horizon2020
- Generally competition funding for large-scale pan-european projects.
Innovate UK
- run regular rounds of sector-specific funding, but also periodically have ‘open’ rounds for a broader range of ideas. The current open call is at this short link: http://bit.ly/OpenInno3
Major calls for potential smart city projects that are coming up from Innovate UK are:
Emerging and Enabling Technologies Round 3 (October 2017)
Energy Catalyst Round 5 (December 2017)
Infrastructure Systems Round 3 (January 2018)
Open Programme Competition (Spring 2018)
Also, keep an eye out for Innovate UK briefings - e.g. the Infrastructure Systems competition briefings are going on now. You can find webcast recordings on the Innovate website.
Andy also briefly covered International competitions as well, e.g. the UK-Malaysia Urban Innovation Challenge which closes on the 6th September.
There are also signposting services such as the European Enterprise Network and the KTN itself which also runs frequent events up and down the country where entrepreneurs and consortia can get advice and guidance.
Andy also hosts an open source list of incubators, accelerators and investors that are out there, which you can access here: http://bit.ly/ktnrefer
And finally, there’s the Future Cities Catapult, of course. The Catapults are the boundary between emerging thought and practice in industry, and they are tasked with earning their way, which means they actively bid for contracts and frequently bring in 3rd party companies to work with them to fulfil them. They are currently looking for 3rd party partners, particularly in the IoT space.
Looking ahead, there is also the UK’s Industrial Strategy, which is currently being consulted on, and as I mentioned back in February I think it was, there is a decent chance that one of the themes will be “Integrated and Sustainable Cities”, so we should keep an eye out for that.
Martin Mayfield: Urban Flows Observatory (UflO)
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Martin presented the slides that we ran through without him at the last meetup, but this time we got to hear it from the horse’s mouth :)
Check out the video to understand exactly what the Project is about, who’s behind it and the technology they are using to implement it, but the important things to take away are the following:
At it’s core, the project aims to measure the energy metabolism of the city - energy flows in and out, material properties, radiation, etc.
It’s a three-year project with a capital budget only - i.e. it has money for equipment, but not for people or projects beyond the core mission. However, there are opportunities to use the infrastructure to do some other related things if partners can fund it.
They are going to install a research-grade sensor network in the city. These could act as a reference network to compare and evaluate other (cheaper) sensors - i.e. it can act as a test bed for comparative equipment studies.
On top of this they are looking to add a layer of high-quality weather stations, and would like to site these in local primary schools.
They also want to run annual open competitions over the life of the project, that will provide kit for sensor projects to the tune of £50k-£100k for good ideas and applications - things that use the observatory’s infrastructure to provide ‘multipliers’ to the project. These competitions will be run by a steering group.
There’s also a fixed camera element to the network, and energy monitoring which is probably the least worked out component at this stage.
They are looking at building sensor platforms into ground vehicles, drones and other aerial vehicles to map the built environment and material properties of the city (or the portion on the city under study at least).
And finally, there is of course a significant data storage and analytics platform which is buying built out as well, with industry partners.
The big things for the smart city community in Sheffield are the competitions, and getting involved in figuring out how the infrastructure could become sustainable beyond the lifetime of the observatory project, otherwise it will become a teaching tool for the University of Sheffield, and cease delivering value back to the city at large.
There will likely be workshops and engagements on both of these things, and no doubt updates at future SmartSheffield meetups - we’ll keep everyone posted on these.
Pennie Raven: The Heart of Sharrow Development
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Pennie, along with her business partner Jonny Douglas, presented on their mission to convert the old Victorian mansion house and grounds at Mount Pleasant, which is sandwiched between one of the most affluent parts of the city, and one of the most deprived.
They are proposing to convert the property into an an integrated complex for living, learning, innovating and producing, and holding it all under a community trust with a remit to ensure the complex delivers its foundational values to the local community for a minimum of 250 years.
It’s a radical, imaginative, future-oriented and extremely smart piece of urban design, and could really be a globally significant and pioneering project right in the city of Sheffield. Pennie and Jonny are looking for technically savvy and connected people to join their board and provide advice and guidance, should they manage to gain approval to proceed later this month, and then raise the £17m necessary for the first phase of development.
Several SmartSheffield regulars have said they would be happy to join the effort, and if you are also interested, please let me know and I’ll put you in touch with them.
Meanwhile, do watch Pennie’s presentation, it’s really extremely exciting!
Malcolm Snook: Adding audio to any flat surface
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Malcolm is sales manager at Intelect, who develop technology that converts flat panels (or pretty much all kinds of materials) into high-performance speakers. These systems are most often built into ceilings, but as they can essentially convert any flat surface into a speaker, there are lots of unexplored applications, and surely some in the smart city domain.
For example, one bespoke system Intelect developed was for a Formula One team that wanted its mechanics to be able to listen to music while they set up and dismantled their garages on race weekends, but didn't want the additional clutter of a portable stereo in a busy and often cramped environment. Intelect built actuators into one of the large powered flight cases the team used to transport their equipment, along with a bluetooth receiver, thus converting the case itself a giant hi fi system that required no additional logistical effort to transport and use.
The challenge that Malcolm poses is how could this technology be used to make our cities communicate with us better?
Chris Dymond: SmartSheffield News
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As is customary, we finished the talks with my regular update of recent smart-city related activity. In this edition, I briefly covered the following:
Sheffield Public Wifi
This procurement is still ongoing and there’s no announcement yet.
Sheffield City Region Transport Prospectus
The Sheffield City Region just published this document, it follows on from the region’s Integrated Infrastructure Plan which was released earlier in the year, and lays out how they intend to work with Transport for the North, Government, national delivery agencies and local partners to deliver the transport improvements necessary to enable the region’s economic and spatial ambitions. There is some stuff in it about smart mobility.
The Things Network Sheffield
I reported on the group’s second meeting which was held just before the SmartSheffield meetup proper. Full notes of the meeting are published on the Network’s community page, but the main concerns currently are around whether to wait for TTN’s own gateways to be released, or whether we should build our own using 3rd party kit sooner, and what the precise implications are of trying to connect gateways via corporate networks and what the alternatives are.
Also, there is going to be a northern Things Network gathering at the Wuthering Bytes festival at Hebden Bridge on Monday the 3rd September, as well as a sensor build workshop on the Sunday. Check these things out here!
Sheffield Meta-Meetup
I also mentioned that Sheffield Digital and Google were collaborating to host the city’s first meta-meetup - a meetup for tech meetup organisers. This has now taken place and was very well attended. So far we’ve identified over 60 individual events and event series and we’ll be doing more to integrate and promote them all and the communities they represent. This provides a great way of accessing technical expertise, and there are definitely opportunities for some cross-fertilisation between events.
Sheffield Communicators Network
I drew attention to another network in Sheffield, which is a regular monthly meeting of people who run the city’s major social media accounts, at which they support each others’ good practice, inform each other of upcoming campaigns and events, share assets and collaborate on promoting them. It’s been running for about 6 months (participants now refer to it as “Twitter Club”!) and the organisations involved report that they have seen a significant uplift in attendance and reach. It also means that the city is now able to speak with a much more coherent voice about things and make more noise - things that we should bear in mind as and when our projects need to avail themselves!
MoveMore
June was MoveMore Month again, and it looks like initiative was a roaring success - I believe MoveMore is the largest city-wide project to get citizens to be more active and healthy and it’s something we should support. There should be a lot of data available from the thousands of movement app installs the project generated! SmartSheffielders interested in this should get in contact with the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre - let me know and I’ll make an intro!
Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre
...and speaking of which, plans for the new AWRC building out at the Olympic Legacy Park have just been submitted. And as well as being an amazing facility for sports science and ‘active lifestyle’ research, they are also looking to create a comprehensive sensor network around the park and there are definitely opportunities for smart city projects around that. Again, let me know if you’re interested and I’ll put you in touch. Very usefully, Prof Steve Haake who heads the centre runs regular informal breakfast meetings to expand their network and meet people who could become partners.
City Standards Institute: PAS 184 Smart Cities – Developing project proposals for delivering smart city solutions
Finally, just a heads up that the CSI have just published a briefing document detailing at length how to go about developing proposals for smart city projects. It is well worth a read, and I wonder if we shouldn’t run a dedicated workshop to explain it all in the near future..?
As always, please let me know if you spot anything we should cover in SmartSheffield News! I know there are more things going on in this city that are useful and relevant for us to know about!
Actually, two very quick extra things to mention:
Firstly, the annual Digital Leaders awards were held a few weeks ago, and the award for overall UK Digital Leader of the Year want to Helen Milner OBE of Sheffield-based Good Things Foundation for her, and their, excellent work in digital inclusion; added to which the UK’s Digital Charity Leader of the Year went to Sheffield Flourish for their excellent city-wide mental health platform. Massive congrats to them both, and more evidence of the range and quality of city-oriented applications of digital tech and innovation in Sheffield.
Secondly, there have been serious talks recently about bringing much of the city’s digital activity into a more formal and joined up governance arrangement, led by Mark Gannon at Sheffield City Council. There’s a lot more on this to come, but it’s worth noting that very positive developments are now afoot.
Phew, that’s it for the write up!
The July meetup was absolutely packed with ideas and inspiration, and it’s really tremendous to see so many people at the event contributing. And really great to see a lot of new faces as well!
The next event is likely to be on Monday the 11th September (the 1st Monday clashes with the Things Network gathering at Wuthering Bytes) - info about it will go out very soon and please let me know if you would like to present something!
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Notes from Meetup #4: At Barclays Eagle Lab Live
A bit belatedly as Easter intervened, here is the summary of the April SmartSheffield event, that was held on the Monday the 3rd at Sheffield Hallam University’s Cantor Building, in conjunction with Barclays Eagle Lab Live.
Thanks everyone for coming, and we’ll hopefully see you at the next event which will most likely be on Monday the 5th June.
Tim Woolliscroft: Could Smart Communities improve the efficiency of Cancer Services in Sheffield?
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Tim is a graduate tutor and PhD research student at Sheffield Hallam University who is investigating the potential for digitally-enabled networks and related technology to change the way things are currently done in healthcare. How could such networks enable communities to foster better services and outcomes? How could they better connect patients and carers with professionals? How can this be inclusive? How can data be used without impacting on privacy? What is the relationship between healthcare and smart cities? What might utopia and dystopia look like, and how might the latter be avoided?
To try to answer questions such as these, and to help develop realistic models for how such a change could come about, Tim has organised a series of workshops to investigate particular elements of this vision. He is looking to make connections with a broad range of people, including healthcare professionals, managers, ICT experts, local government employees, cancer survivors and members of the general public, and would also like to reach out to the smart city community for anyone who is also interested in changing the way things are done in health.
The first of these workshops was held last month and looked at the current system of cancer services (you don't need to have attended this event to participate in future ones).
The second workshop, subtitled "The Future", will take place on the 10th May, and begins to shift the focus to what an alternative model might look like.
You can register for this event here.
The third event is scheduled for June 8th and is subtitled "Time to Get Critical". This workshop will take a critical look at the information gathered in the first two workshops to determine which ideas offer value and whether they point to efficiency improvements that could be pursued.
You can register for this third workshop here.
The fourth event will be announced in due course.
This is a really good opportunity for anyone interested in smart health to get involved in understanding the real challenges and opportunities, and to meet other people involved in this field. We'll report further on this and hopefully Tim will come back and talk about the outcomes from the workshop series later in the year.
Meanwhile, here’s a link to Tim’s presentation and the video of his talk in Trello.
Urban Flows Observatory (UFO)
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The Urban Flows Observatory is a new four year research project from RISE, the Resources, Infrastructure Systems and built Environments group at the University of Sheffield, led by Prof Martin Mayfield and Dr Danielle Tingley. RISE is a recently established research group that “seeks to enable the creation of a built environment that allows humanity to thrive within the carrying capacity of the planet.”
The guys at Rise really wanted to come and talk to the SmartSheffield community about the new project, but unfortunately none of them was available on the day, and so instead of waiting until the next event (which will likely be in June), we decided they should send over their presentation and we would collectively try to make sense of it. I have to say, this was a quite enjoyable thing to do and got everyone engaged - I’m now wondering whether we should do this as standard! Equally though, this is not from the horse's mouth, so many apologies for any misrepresentations!
Here’s a summary what (we think) the UFO project is about:
At it’s highest level, the vision for the the Urban Flows Observatory is to create a “metabolic” map of the city of Sheffield, i.e. a holistic picture of energy flows and transformations in and out of the city.
To enable this the project will create a technology platform that consists of sensors (fixed, mobile and atmospheric), data storage, data processing and visualisation tools, along with all the middleware necessary for these parts of the software stack to exchange data.
The funding is primarily for the technology to build the sensor infrastructure and software platform, additional funding and partnerships will be sought to fund applications and specific research that leverages the observatory.
It’s a four-year research project in which Sheffield is in partnership with Bristol and Newcastle.
Along with the sensor network and platform, the project will also develop a LIDAR and sensor equipped vehicle that will take readings of building materials and use machine vision and deep learning to identify the materials and assess their properties, e.g. heat absorption, etc. In other words the project aims to literally understand what Sheffield is made of.
There are a whole range of applications that can come out of this project, along with original research obviously, for instance evaluating building material reuse potential, how newly constructed buildings are actually performing, where electricity micro-grids could be effective, etc.
RISE also want to engage with the local smart city community to help them define the platform and its capabilities with a view to what kinds of application might be possible once it’s in operation. To this end they are looking to schedule a number of workshops, in the next month or so and we’ll have more on this in due course.
RISE’s presentation is published on our Trello board here.
Sheffield Things Network
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As those who’ve attended the last couple of meetups know, the Things Network is an international community of people who are setting up community-based communications networks in their home cities (LoRaWAN for long range, and Bluetooth 4.2, including LE, for short range).
Such a community-based LoRaWAN network would allow devices and sensors to talk to each other at city-wide scale using very low energy (i.e. devices could be in the field for years on a single battery), and could be used to try out all sorts of new applications and digitally enabled experiences for very little cost.
We are also hoping that a commercial provider will install their own LoRaWAN network, which, as long as there’s no spectrum conflict, will provide a route to commercialisation and scaling to other cities. We know there are currently some discussions going on at the city region level around this.
Anyway, we’ve been talking about setting up a Sheffield Things Network for a while, and Scott Knowles and I have now decided to launch that effort. Scott applied to the Things Network for official status last year, and this community is now live.
The community page will be the main coordination point, and will chart the progress of the project and link to all relevant resources. You can access and register with the network here.
In addition, we have also set up a twitter account (@ThingsSHF) for public communications, and a dedicated channel (#ThingsSHF) on the Sheffield Digital Slack team for project chat & coordination.
We are looking for:
Gateway sponsors
I.e. people or companies who would be willing to purchase a LoRaWAN gateway. These gateways cost E300+VAT and provide a range of roughly 6 miles (depending on surrounding structures) and can serve up to 10,000 nodes each.
Gateway hosts
I.e. people or companies who are willing to install a gateway in their premises (preferably up high), connect it to power and an open internet connection (it’s low bandwidth so shouldn’t have a noticeable effect on speeds), keep the firmware up to date and perhaps reboot it occasionally.
Organisers & collaborators
I.e. people who can help us develop the network and then mobilise a community of makers and innovators to use it.
If you would like to help with this effort, please register at the Things Network and join the Sheffield community!
You can see the presentation on our open Trello Board, and comment on it there as well.
SmartSheffield News
Finally, I presented this month’s SmartSheffield News. Here are the headlines:
Sheffield Public WiFi
Not much to report on this other than the Council’s procurement effort is progressing, the bids are in and have been shortlisted, and I have been asked to provide some evaluation as an independent expert. More info to follow over the coming weeks & months.
Sheffield’s Destructor Lamps
Sheffield once had the country’s largest network of ���destructor lamps’ - street lamps that used excess gasses from the sewer system to provide lighting - back in the early 20th century. These were a terrific example of early smart innovation, reusing a dangerous waste product to provide a social good. At its height, the network consisted of over 80 of these lamps, but up until a couple of years ago one a handful remained and only a couple of them provided light. However, the remaining lamps are now being refurbished and decommissioned ones are being restored and placed back in the city, as part of the city-wide Streets Ahead project with Amey/Ferrovial. In addition, the lamps are being put back into operation and although they will no longer use waste sewer gas (the sewage system is much more efficient these days), some of them are being reconnected to the gas supply while others are being fitted out with solar-powered lighting that has been adapted to fit inside the original lamp casings.
Here’s a great interview with Amey’s Street Lighting Operations Manager, Jonathan Skill, that that explains more:
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Distributed Urban Water Infrastructure facility
In addition to the Urban Flows Observatory, the University of Sheffield has also been awarded £3.7m as part of the UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) to invest in a new facility to house research into urban water flows, which will make it the largest urban water research group in the UK.
You can find out more about this new facility here.
SOLAR: Walking at the Speed of Light
SOLAR is a new augmented reality walking trail in Sheffield that maps the solar system to the local geography, with the sun at the Peace Gardens and virtual artworks to discover along the way. The project is a collaboration between the Walking Arts Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University, Epiphany VR and Opus Independents, and has been produced as part of the University’s Catalyst Festival of Creativity.
You can find out more about the project here, and there’s background from the Walking Arts Research Group here.
The SOLAR app is now available on the Apple AppStore and Google Play - search for “Solar Walk Sheffield”.
Smart Cities MOOC
For the last couple of years MK SMart, the smart cities development initiative in Milton Keynes, has been running a MOOC - a massive open online course - on the smart cities concept and its various approaches. They have run six of these courses so far, and the final one commenced on the 10th April. A number of us from the SmartSheffield meetup have joined, and there is still time to register and catch up with progress. The course takes about 3 hours per week to complete, and runs over six weeks. It’s worth joining just to have continued access to the course materials, and you can complete the course at your leisure although of course you will miss out on the access to the course leaders and the lively debate around each topic that people are contributing ‘live’.
The course details and registration page are here.
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And that’s it for this month - see you in June hopefully!
Chris D.
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Notes from the Meetup #3: Getting things talking to each other
The third edition of the SmartSheffield meetup was held on Monday the 6th Feb 2017, and despite the freezing cold and rain we were graced with a record turnout. So thanks everyone who came along!
Here are my notes from the talks and conversations:
Ian Stewart on Arqiva's Sigfox network
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Arqiva is a British telecoms infrastructure company, who operate two low-power wide area network technologies in the UK: FlexNet, which is used for connecting things like electricity and water smart-meters, and is being used in national roll-outs of those devices, and Sigfox which is perhaps more relevant to the SmartSheffield community as it provides an accessible test bed for connected sensors and devices.
Ian Stewart and Simon Scerri-Taylor talked us through Arqiva's strategy in general, and the Sigfox implementation in particular.
Here are the key points:
Sigfox is low energy, low bandwidth and low integrity (meaning it doesn't guarantee that all messages will get delivered).
It is a 'lightweight' network, or a 'chirping' technology rather than a transmission technology.
It provides no encryption natively.
It's messages transport 9 bytes of user data, alongside the package metadata.
The metadata includes the timestamp.
There is no handshaking - messages are simply sent three times in succession to improve the chances of reception.
Devices can send a maximum of 140 messages per day.
Data is stored in Sigfox's cloud storage facility, where it can be accessed by clients or transferred and processed elsewhere.
Sigfox devices can potentially run for over a decade on a couple of AA batteries
Range depends on the environment and power used, but it does penetrate buildings and coverage can quite easily be extended (receivers are the size of a thick laptop).
There is a strong global community and 3rd party support ecosystem for the technology.
Arqiva's have implemented Sigfox networks in 11 cities, including Sheffield.
All this means that this network is suitable for a large number of small, cheap devices that don't need to continually transmit data, but only sporadically, or when things change.
Ian’s presentation and Q&A is on Trello, here: https://trello.com/c/v3tmPO1j
Mark Wheeler on Broadway Partners and TV Whitespace
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Mark Wheeler from Broadway Partners presented their work in TV Whitespace, i.e. using unused television spectrum, to deliver Internet connectivity to areas that are under-served.
Many of these areas are in rural and hard to reach parts of the country, and Broadway Partners have run successful trials in such places, notably on the isle of Aaron in Scotland. However there are a large number of under-served and digitally excluded communities in cities and towns as well, and the company is also developing urban solutions, working with housing associations and local authorities to fill in 'not-spots' where the traditional phone and fibre-based market is not providing adequate coverage. TV Whitespace is particularly suitable for this as it provides for non-line of sight transmission, along with high bandwidth - by the end of the year 100mbps devices will be available for under £100.
Mark's presentation and Q&A are on Trello, here: https://trello.com/c/4G1o13sK
Scott Knowles from ObjectForm on Barclay's Pop-up Eagle Lab and LoRaWAN
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Scott Knowles from 3D Printing firm ObjectForm talked to us about the ‘pop-up Eagle Lab' he is organising with Barclays next month, and particularly the LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) node that he is setting up.
Barclays Eagle Labs are innovation / incubation spaces that Barclays Bank are setting up around the country - there are currently 9 in operation, and Sheffield could become the next. In preparation for that, Barclays in conjunction with ObjectForm and Sheffield Hallam University, are running an Eagle Lab for a month as a trial, from the 27th February in the beautiful Sheffield Institute of Arts building on Fitzalan Square.
There will be a whole range of activities and technologies to try out and experiment with, and Scott will be publishing full details of the initiative soon (and we'll report it when he does). Of particular interest to SmartSheffield, though, is the fact that the lab will be setting up Sheffield's first LoRaWAN node and provides a great opportunity for developers to try out applications and see what the technology is capable of.
This also provides an opportunity to set up a community-run communications network in the city, and join other northern cities like Leeds and Manchester in joining the Amsterdam-based "Things Network" which is a global community of grassroots LoRaWAN network operators.
Scott's talk and Q&A is here: https://trello.com/c/CS9dks0p
My Sheffield Pound
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The 4th speaker of the evening was Kurtis Wright, who explained his ambition to create a local digital wallet for Sheffield, in order to provide a convenient payment mechanism for local independent retailers, and boost the local economy by reducing payment fees and providing opportunities to keep money circulating within the city.
In essence Kurtis' scheme is similar to other local currency schemes such as the Brixton or Bristol Pounds, and just like those it is a Sterling equivalent and has a fixed 1-to-1 exchange rate, however it differs in that it is designed to be digital first, with payment transactions via bluetooth LE, and uses blockchain as it's secure ledger to record transactions.
Kurtis' ultimate aim is to create an entire local ecosystem around the currency, with an e-commerce platform and a range of business, delivery and logistics services enabled through it.
Kurtis' presentation and Q&A is here: https://trello.com/c/W284yVuT
SmartSheffield News
There’s no video of SmartSheffield news this month unfortunately, but here are the topics I raised:
Public City Centre WiFi
Sheffield City Council is currently seeking bids for a concession contract to provide free public wifi in the city centre. Sheffield Digital recently issued an open letter to the council to encourage them to consider a number of aspects of keen interest and importance to the local digital community.
This letter can be found here, and a follow up post is here.
“In Praise of Air” comes to an end
The 2 year planning permission for The University of Sheffield’s giant ‘catalytic poetry’ experiment is about to end, which means the huge banner showing a poem by Simon Armitage on the side of the Alfred Denny building is going to come down. The banner is treated with a photocatalytic surface developed at the university, that harnesses sunshine and oxygen to break down air borne pollutants. It’s estimated that the banner has removed over 20 tons of pollutants from the air since it was put up twenty years ago, and represents a world first in urban air quality interventions of this type.
More information about this is available here.
Air Pollution Petition
On the theme of the city’s air pollution problem, there is a petition currently active on Change.org requesting a new Air Pollution Action Plan for the city.
The petition and accompanying open letter is here.
#SYGrit
There is a #SYGrit hashtag on Twitter that is used by local authorities, partners and the public to keep people informed about gritting across South Yorkshire, including asking people to report the levels of their local grit bins. This is worth bearing in mind should anyone experiment with using sensors to monitor grit-bin levels.
State of Sheffield Report
The State of Sheffield Report is being launched on Tuesday the 14th Feb. This will be the seventh year of the report, which is designed to take a sober and honest look at the city across a number of different dimensions, and represents a good way of understanding the major challenges that the city faces.
Information about the report, and its previous editions, can be found here.
Sheffield City Region Vision - A Better Future Together
For roughly a the last year, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the two Sheffield universities have been working with other partners to develop a vision for the city region that takes a 25 year view of its challenges and opportunities. This vision document is being launched on Friday the 17th Feb.
More information can be found here.
SmartCity Funding Opportunities
Following the talks, we also discussed some smart city funding opportunities, and how we might work together to unlock some of them. Below are the three funds that I highlighted that could present opportunities for the Sheffield smart city ecosystem to develop consortia and pilot projects. In addition, we discussed whether to use some of the meetup time to develop ideas and proposals, but the consensus decision was that the meetups weren’t the best forum for this, mainly because this process needs time and attention, both of which are in short supply at the meetups especially following a good programme of talks and discussion.
Therefore, we will look to create some side-events to look at specific opportunities and invite the community to self-select their attendance and level of participation. We can either organise these or promote and support community members who want to initiate their own collaborations (likely both), so please get in touch and let us know if there is an opportunity you would like to work on and are seeking partners to develop with, and we’ll get the word out and help with venue, etc.
Here are the current funding opportunities that we highlighted at the meetup:
Innovate UK: Innovation in Infrastructure Systems - Round 2
In summary:
Projects must show significant innovation in one of the priority areas:
‘smart’ infrastructure
energy systems
connected transport
urban living
Proposals must improve business growth, productivity and/or create export opportunities for at least one UK small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) involved in the project.
There are 2 competition options:
£5 million for projects that last from 3 months to 1 year with costs from £25,000 to £100,000
£10 million for projects lasting from 1 year to 3 years with costs between £100,000 and £5 million
The competition opened on 16 January 2017.
Initial registrations must be in before midday on 15 March 2017.
Full details can be found here.
Innovate UK: Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative - Food/Water/Energy Nexus
In summary:
This competition looks for new understanding and solutions to the systemic management of food, water and energy in cities. It is an international collaborative competition requiring the participation of at least 3 different countries.
The total available budget for this competition is €28.5 million, including support from the European Commission through Horizon 2020. The UK is to provide around £1.6 million in order to fund 6 to 7 UK projects. The maximum amount of funding for a UK project will be €300,000.
Collaborative UK consortia will be jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Innovate UK. All UK consortia must include partners and work programmes that are relevant to all 3 funding agencies. The UK element of the competition will be managed by ESRC.
The competition opened on 9 December 2016
The deadline for pre-proposals is 6:00pm (GMT) on 15 March 2017
Full details are here.
Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund - Integrated & Sustainable Cities
This funding stream is still in the consultation phase and full details have not been released yet, however we know that the “Integrated and Sustainable Cities” application area is one of ten areas the UK government is looking to support with research and development funding under this umbrella, and there is an article on the current situation and planned activity at Innovate UK’s blog here.
Right, that’s it for this month. Thanks everyone for coming and getting involved!
We’ll announce the next meetup, and workshop activities shortly but meanwhile please mark Monday the 6th March in your diary as that will most likely be the date of the next meetup.
Cheers,
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Notes from Meetup #11: City Scale Systems
On Monday the 3rd September SmartSheffield returned from the Summer break to a full house, this time looking at city-wide infrastructure that forms an application stack on which developers and users can build new services and experiences.
We kicked off with Living PlanIT’s Urban Operating System, which is now available across Sheffield as part of their partnership with Westfield Health; then Ruckus’ city WiFi vision and what they are doing with their new access points; followed by SmartWorld Connect, who returned to explain how they are evolving their city app store platform; and Louis Pohl presented his vision for “Hours” - an application for measuring, tokenising and trading work carried out in the voluntary sector. So in combination we covered: sensing, connectivity, data management, application development and discovery, which then posed the question: is this the city technology stack we want?
Please get in touch if you have an opinion, or join the Sheffield Digital Slack community and pick up the conversation in the #SmartSheffield channel.
Here are the talks...
Dan Byles on Living PlanIT’s Urban Operating System
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Dan is Head of Corporate Development at Living PlanIT, and expressed great excitement at being part of what he described as “the whole tech revolution that’s starting to take place in Sheffield”.
Through their partnership with Westfield Health, Living PlanIT is making their Urban Operating System available to application developers and partners across the whole of Sheffield, free of change, and not just in areas of health and social care. They hope that doing this will encourage new applications and services to be built using its open standards-based infrastructure.
Living PlanIT are a relatively small tech company, founded ten years ago, and specialise in digital integration of the built environment, from buildings to districts to cities. The Urban Operating System (UOS) evolved from a system originally created to manage low latency, high volume telemetry data for Formula 1, and this technology still forms its core. The vision for the UOS goes further however, towards creating a platform where a broad range of city data can be made available through common interfaces and open standards and combined into new applications.
Dan presented a good overview of the challenges of urbanisation, technological disruption and the Smart City movement, and expressed his belief that:
“...there isn't yet a smart city anywhere on the planet. There are cities that have narrow [proofs of concept], there are cities that are doing something interesting with parking here, or congestion over there, but the idea of creating a common data platform that enables you to gather data from a wide myriad of existing sources, bring it together and make it available through open standards and integrate it for people to use, for a vibrant 3rd party ecosystem to use and create value from still hasn’t happened anywhere. And when it does, and it could happen here in Sheffield, it’s going to be extremely powerful.”
This is the company’s vision for the Urban Operating System - a platform that enables a ‘triple bottom line’ by:
Improving economic outcomes by reduced costs and enabling new businesses.
Creating a more sustainable infrastructure, as it is integrated and put to more uses.
Providing better services and better experiences.
If you are interested in using Living PlanIT’s platform, let us know at [email protected] and we’ll put you in touch :)
Kia Cottrell on WiFi as a platform for smart cities
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Kia is Business Development Manager for EMEA at Ruckus Networks, who, since their acquisition by Arris, are engaged in translating the home WiFi experience into the outside world.
In this talk she explains why WiFi is a great platform for Smart City applications and how they are using WiFi to deliver more than just connectivity, for example in the LinkNYC smart kiosks in New York; in conjunction with Google’s “Station Project” where train stations in India, Indonesia and Mexico have been kitted out to provide WiFi access to the public; and via connected signage and other urban applications.
Ruckus’ WiFi Access Points (APs) can now be discretely hidden inside common street furniture such as lighting, and as cities upgrade to low energy LED streetlights, several are taking the opportunity to add cost-effective wireless infrastructure at the same time.
She also explains how single Ruckus APs can now act as IoT controllers for a range of different wireless protocols and services. This means cities can deploy a multitude of infrastructures, best suited to their specific use cases, for instance public safety systems (including gunshot recognition in the US), flood monitoring or smart parking, etc., and manage the whole network via a single interface and configuration layer.
Kia’s talk sparked an excellent Q&A discussion on data collection, sensors and the benefits of combining data in order to verify and support (or even just make sense of) data from single sources.
Tony Bicknell SmartWorld Connect
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Tony very kindly brought Smart World Connect back to SmartSheffield to explain how the system has developed over the summer, and answer some of the questions Jorge wasn’t able to when he visited us back in May.
SMW started out as a platform for local communities where people could build and discover apps to connect with local gardeners and other hobbyists, to arrange dog walks or street parties, etc.
However, they soon discovered that councils weren’t willing to fund these things in the current budgetary environment, and so they had to pivot in order to develop alternative revenue streams for the system, at least able to cover the costs of deployment and maintenance.
For this reason they now focus primarily on providing App Stores for the high street, which incentivise people to visit and engage more with their town and city centres, as these transition from predominantly retail-based to experience-based modes. They now have an App Store solution that can be deployed in any geographic area, including neighbourhoods, which provides an application platform for developers to create experiences on.
They use Google’s Flutter framework, which produces both Android and iOS compatible native mobile apps. In addition, SWC have made a series of templates available which enable people with little programming knowledge to create apps. The business model relies on the ecosystem producing myriad apps for all kinds of audience and purpose. The platform provides everything you would expect from an App Store, including a full security model and works well in conjunction with local public WiFi installations, which allow users to discover the AppStore and download it.
Providing a localised app store in this way allows more of the city’s under-utilised resources to be brought into public service - from student developers building apps, to allowing private firms to easily offer their spare parking spaces out of office hours, etc. And the platform also provides for personalised opt-in push-notifications for special offers, adverts, etc. and provides a payment gateway via Stripe and the ability for app providers to charge micro-payments.
SWC also provide a direct app development service to convert local authority content into app format, and use it to begin to populate the App Store, and prompt local developers to add their applications.
Louis Pohl on Hours
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Louis is a Sheffield-based architecture graduate and social entrepreneur who set up the Foodhall Project a few years ago, which is a community kitchen and meeting space that makes surplus food available for people to cook, and is one of the few places on Sheffield that brings people together from both sides of the city’s “great divide”.
Louis’ recent thinking has focused on the promise vs the reality of automation, the surpluses that automation and technology has created and the inequality that has arisen from the failure to of our politics to redistribute those surpluses. Meanwhile, far away from those surpluses and those who benefit the most from their production, are thousands of volunteers working to help their communities keep their heads above water - in Sheffield alone there are more than 3,500 such organisations - but their effort goes almost entirely unaccounted for and unacknowledged.
Louis characterises this as a “wicked problem”, and in this talk explains how multiple factors pile on top of each other to produce the entrenched socio-economic failures that we now witness.
The practical solution to this abstract problem, Louis believes, is to find a way to capture the value that is created in the voluntary economy, make it visible to the rest of the economy, and recognise that value and provide a means to ‘pay’ for it.
This has lead him to design Hours, a blockchain-based ledger whereby communities can issue tokens for work which can be performed by voluntary organisations and which can then be traded or openly converted for other value. As well as visibility and accountability, the system also allows for corporate contributions and surpluses to be tokenised and introduced into this economy, which can then also be offset against corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes and corresponding tax incentives.
The base value that underpins the token currency on the platform is individual people’s tiem contributions, which leave an audit trail of the acts they’ve carried out and the people they’ve affected.
Louis has tested this concept via EASA - the European Architecture Students Assembly - with an economy of over 500 people, and Louis is now looking for partners to develop a city-wide proof of concept in Sheffield. This includes any organisations that have surpluses they can add introduce into the system - from event tickets to transport, food, training, etc.; as well as collaboration with public sector organisations to develop community-based delivery of public services.
SmartSheffield News
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This month’s selection of news items included:
Kollider: NVA/BGI/Barclays Eagle Lab / Last Friday
dotSHF website, call for case studies and posts
people.SHF
Governance.SHF
Social Enterprise Exchange
Buses for Sheffield
Ofo bikes pullout
Shopappy
Sheffield foster care game
Sheffield Park project
Things Network Sheffield
And that wraps it up - thanks everyone you came along, once again the event was a sell out, and we’re already looking forward to the next one!
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Notes from Meetup #9: The Things Network Takeover (Part 2)
Here are the rest of the talks from the March 2018 event...
Dave Mee from MadLab, The Things Network Manchester and Things North
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Dave provides the history of Things Network Manchester, and its origins in civic engagement projects MadLab undertook with Manchester City Council several years ago, in which they discovered how difficult it was to implement smart cities - everything proved hard to do, from building and maintaining the technology available at the time to gaining the right permissions to site sensors and network gateways.
This led them to visit the Things Network in Amsterdam to investigate its potential, and discovered how far advanced they were, how many commercial concerns they had addressed, and the potential of the technology stack to be open and build a community around it.
They took this knowledge back to Manchester and set about bootstrapping a network, starting with the infrastructure (establishing the first gateway at Julien’s house in Chorlton).
They then began engaging with people and city organisations to explain what the technology is capable of and build capacity to use it. The first project to emerge from this was the IoT Smoke Detector in conjunction with the Fire Service, which also provided access to the service’s communications towers as sites for new TTN gateways.
The also established a monthly meetup to build the community, extend the message and generate new collaborations, and extended their advocacy around the country, including at the Wuthering Bytes conference in Hebden Bridge in 2017.
Inspired by the work Ben Ward has done with the Oxford Flood Network, and the switch from ZigBee / WiFi backhaul to a Things Network solution, they got involved with Andrew Back in Calderdale and the effort to extend the network across the whole of the UK.
And more recently, they have been working with an industrial partner to monitor noise pollution, and this is another example of a process they have observed where the initial network is established for commercial purposes, as it is a great cable replacement, but there is so much overcapacity on the network it is then very easy to share it with communities and other stakeholders for additional applications and value.
Over the last couple of years, Things Manchester has seen networks begin to proliferate across the North of england, so much so that it is nearly feasible to move freely around the country without ever leaving coverage. This has led them to initiative the Things North initiative to bring these networks together to collaborate and to proactively connect them together.
Visit the Things North website.
Deepayan Bhowmik from Sheffield Hallam University on IoT Sheffield and Things Connected
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Deepayan presented Hallam University’s collaboration with the Digital Catapult to set up one of their Things Connected gateways, which is another LoRa implementation but currently incompatible with the Things Network.
The University intends to leverage this network to provide a means for businesses, students and researchers to experiment with new LPWAN applications, using the resources in the computer science department (Deepayan himself specialises in machine vision, signal processing and related cyber security). This includes work on understanding the capabilities of the technology, and potential attacks and exploits.
The hope is that this effort will develop more people who understand and can build applications, who can then take their skills and experience to other networks, including TTN, and that this network provides another option for people looking to experiment with LPWAN technology.
There are also funding pots available via Innovate UK for projects using the network.
Perry Ismangil from Teluu and The Things Network Sheffield
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Perry is a software engineer and co-founder of Teluu, who provide an open source software stack for phone call management. He attended the “Build and Deploy” workshop at Wuthering Bytes in 2017, and that was his first exposure to LPWAN technology. However, when he returned to Sheffield he wasn’t able to connect the device he had built to the network as there were no gateways in Sheffield at that time! So he joined the Things Network kickstarter and was one of the lucky recipients of a working gateway in the early batches. He admits the range isn’t great, as it’s sat behind a window in his house at street level, but it provides connectivity for his purposes and has been very useful for learning about the technology, especially with others in the Sheffield Things Network.
In order to really take things forward though, there needs to be more capacity building and collaboration, and he is looking forward to the series of Smart City Hackathons that are being put together in conjunction with Sheffield Hackspace, starting in April.
Visit the Things Network Sheffield community page.
George Taylor from Caudata and The Things Network Sheffield
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Caudata use wireless to bring connectivity to places where cables won’t work. They run their own ISP in Sheffield and built point-to-point networks around the country.
George is particularly interested in applications of LoRaWAN in natural habitats, in our national parks and wild spaces. For instance there are just three breeding pairs of Hen Harriers left in England, but the monitoring technologies that are currently in use to protect them are neither reliable nor energy efficient. Caudata has a division that looks at wildlife monitoring and surveillance, and they are working to trial LoRaWAN deployments using the Things Network to improve current efforts.
He further explained that there is a mission to remove hedgehogs from some of the Hebridean Islands, where they are proliferating due to a dearth of predators, and transport them to the mainland. £3.5 has been allocated for this effort, however the process currently involves rangers regularly checking hedgehog traps, at a total cost of around £1000 per animal repatriation. George is hoping to help address this by developing IoT enabled hedgehog traps that can report their occupancy.
Finally, he has also been involved in an effort to measure the degradation of mountain flower habitats around the flanks of Snowdon, caused by an increase ice climbing in the area. This also involved installing a Things Network gateway to relay sensor data over long distances, and resulted in Caudata picking up packets from Snowden in Castleton in the Derbyshire Peaks, measuring a max range of 140km! (Although George reckons the technology is capable of much longer ranges with specialised equipment and higher line-of-sight deployment).
If anyone is interested in use cases like these, get in touch via the Things Network Sheffield community page.
And that was it - 8 really interesting talks covering a wide range of activity and developments in long range IoT technology across the North of England. We look forward to the next Things Network Takeover! :)
Chris & Matt
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Notes from Meetup #8: It’s not about the Tech!
Well this has taken quite a while to write up!
Partly it’s taken this long because life kept getting in the way, and partly because we had all kinds of trouble getting the videos down from Matt’s iCloud in one piece. A couple of the files were too big, and apparently corrupted in several places - in the end we had to set up another camera in front of my monitor, record the videos streaming to it, and then re-edit the new video to remove all the pauses and glitches.
This took some time.
As a result, Nigel Slack’s and RIck Robinson’s talks are pretty poor quality - they haven’t been completely lost though! Steve Turner’s, Kurtis Wright’s and Matt’s SmartSheffield News are at the usual level of smart phone fidelity, luckily.
All this has held up the write ups of the other events we’ve held since February as well - but now the video issue is resolved and things are calming down a little bit for Summer, these should follow very soon as well.
Anyway, back to the programme.
The February event took place on Monday the 12th February, and was themed “It's Not About the Tech!” with talks that attempt to show the wider rationales, impacts and considerations of introducing urban technologies. The evening kicked off with...
Nigel Slack on being an Active Citizen
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Nigel Slack is a self-described Active Citizen, which he characterises as “a campaigner, an advocate, someone who challenges the status quo - someone working to make the city a better place”. In this talk he explains the different aspects to his practice, and the ways in which he tries to make public decision-making more transparent and accessible to the general public.
Nigel talks about his work with other local and regional civil society organisations such as Sheffield for Democracy, the Electoral Reform Society at the University of Sheffield and Sheffield City Partnership, engagement with Citizens Assemblies, and the concept of Administrative Evil which was his topic at the recent Festival of Debate.
He also presents the "Talking Sheffield" show on Sheffield Live, the city's community TV and media platform, and runs a blog called The Public Interest, where he posts regularly about issues affecting the citizens of Sheffield.
On the subject of digital technology, Nigel says that one of his major concerns is centred around the idea that it “promotes a perfect way of doing things. That you’re not doing it right. Yet. Unless you’ve got the piece of tech that shows you how to do it”, and that it has a tendency to feed our individual neuroses.
He also discusses the two areas in which change in cities is most needed: infrastructure and governance, and how he engages with those agendas to affect change.
Nigel relies on donations from citizens to fund his work, which represents an interesting paradigm in the way citizens engage in local affairs, in parallel to the local press and other sources of information.
In the 2015 SmartSheffield report, under the Leadership theme, we wrote about the need to ‘Harness Movements’. We said:
“With so much of the population now networked together, and talking to each other about things that affect them in their environment (both the good and the bad), the ability to listen to people's concerns; recognise where there are motivated groups; provide insight, information and tools to enable them; and connect them with other city actors who can help them make a positive difference, are crucial leadership skills that should be fostered.”
Active citizens like Nigel may be able to provide the critical insight that enables this to happen in ways that are effective.
Rick Robinson on Urban Challenges and Opportunities
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Rick is Digital Property and Cities Leader at Arup, and here provides an overview of the most significant challenges facing cities across the world, including low productivity, an ageing population, the squeeze on local authority budgets, worsening health outcomes, and food sustainability.
Rick’s practice focuses on the “creation of positive outcomes through the intersection of individual behaviour, place and technology”, and he looks at the problems caused by previous generations of technology (e.g. the automobile and concrete) and urban policy (e.g. national transport infrastructure to connect the UK’s city centres) and the negative effects this had on land value, livability and deprivation (see Lichfield, 2015, and UCL, 2014).
How can we avoid such consequences in the next generation of technological change? Rick points to one overarching challenge, and three huge opportunities:
The huge challenge is displacement. Nobody yet know how disruptive the change is going to be over the next 50 years, as at least half the tasks that are currently performed by humans are performed by machine. Will our societies be able to adapt sufficiently to perform the higher level tasks that will escape automation? Will a majority be unable to find work and reliant on benefits or a universal basic income? Will the vast majority of the world's wealth be concentrated among a few global platforms? These are the questions that really define our time.
There are also significant opportunities, though:
We’ve never before had so much data so readily available to make use of, to predict, to analyse to innovate with and convert into value, and it’s never been easier or cheaper to start a new business and be productive.
So the three opportunities are that digital technology is able to provide (open) data, (open) innovation and (individual) empowerment.
Not all models are equally beneficial though. For instance the platform businesses that have scaled up rapidly in recent years have produced inequalities, whereby those providing labour (e.g. Deliveroo riders) are relatively disadvantaged, while those providing assets (e.g. AirBnB hosts) are relatively advantaged - in other worlds the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer (see McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2014 and JP Morgan Chase, 2016).
The key will be to find and promote arrangements that provide new efficiencies but also have predominantly positive externalities.
And there are huge opportunities to apply technology to make work an order of magnitude more efficient than it is currently.
Steve Turner on Bridging the Gap between City Challenges and Digital Solutions
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Steve Turner is Digital Cities Lead at Arup, and here he dissects the gap between the realities of municipal leadership and local authority service provision, and the potential that digital technology presents. In 2017 Arup published a Global Review of Smart Cities, in which they showed the key purposes for which cities employ digital technology are to improve outcomes and efficiencies; to accelerate economic growth and to increase citizen engagement.
In practice, though, there is generally a yawning gap between the challenges that local authorities, and service users face and the technology and design firms who could develop suitable solutions to these issues.
There are lots of solutions looking for problems, and lots of vendors trying to sell things, but local authorities often don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to appreciate what is available in the marketplace, let alone assess a broad set of solutions. Even in the flagship Smart Cities, there is frequently no great legacy after the public money runs out.
There are examples of good applications of urban technology, such as Christchurch’s Digital Masterplanning, the DOLL Living Lab in Denmark, air quality improvements in Lille, savings from digital transformation in Camden, and elsewhere.
But the gulf between problem and solution still remains in most places.
Arup’s approach to this problem is to develop innovation engagement initiatives, in which they work with city leaders to understand the local challenges starting with the city strategy or city plan. They then unpick the key challenges by interviewing service managers and users, and engage with the tech sector to scope out those challenges. Often this process identifies 20 or 30 challenges initially, and then reduces these down to just three or four.
These challenges then feed a programme whereby tech SMEs are shortlisted and then work alongside the local authority for roughly six months to prototype and trial solutions, before, hopefully, scaling up. This gives the local authority and tech firms the opportunity to work together and come to understand the opportunities.
Kurtis Wright on Open Banking and LociPay
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Kurtis spoke to us roughly a year ago about his project to create a local digital currency called My Sheffield Pound, and he now returns to explain how this concept has evolved into a new fintech startup called LociPay, which is taking advantage of a profound shift in the European regulatory landscape for banking.
A new law - the PSD2 (Payment Service Directive 2) - came into force in January this year, which amongst other things requires the 9 main UK banks to publish open APIs so that 3rd parties can access bank accounts and services.
2 kinds of new services will make use of these new capabilities:
Account Information Service Providers (AISPs), that poll, aggregate and visualise financial information.
Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISPs), which essentially act as a new merchant gateway with direct access to the customer’s bank account, and don’t need to go via Visa or Mastercard or any other interface.
This is the route that Loci Pay is taking, in order to provide a new mobile payment mechanism for local transactions, independent retailers and SMEs, and provide them with a far cheaper transaction costs. In addition, it acts as a bank account to consumers which has no fees, via a partner challenger bank.
Kurtis believes that by providing a niche payment service, consumer can also use the brand awareness to know they are making locally economically supportive purchasing decisions, no matter where they are in the country. I.e. if the venue accepts LociPay, you can be sure that their revenue is not being routed offshore.
And then in future his plan is to encourage positive budgeting and savings behaviour via additional AISP services.
SmartSheffield News
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Matt took over news duties this month, and covered the following:
SCR Digital Action Plan (still not publically released)
Sheffield Digital Skills Action Plan
IoT Tribe North in Barnsley
Kollider
Urban Flows Observatory - new sensor van
Things Network Sheffield - new gateways with WANdisco
Public WiFi
Sheffield Transport Vision
Sheffield Box - welcomes new arrivals to Sheffield
SCC/Veolia/Magtech Electric Refuse Vehicle Trial
Ofo Bikes
#SmartSheffield#smart cities#NIgel Slack#active citizenship#Rick Robinson#Steve Turner#Arup#Kurtis Wright#digital currencies#Loci Pay
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I'm back in the market!
In the 2 years since we founded Sheffield Digital (and the nearly three since we started talking about the project seriously), the organisation has established itself as the representative voice of the local digital tech industry and the wonderful community of people who work in tech here. We're really pleased with what we've been able to achieve, and we'll keep working very hard to make more things happen and keep people informed. We're going to be celebrating our 2nd birthday on May the 18th at The Platform - more about this very soon on the Sheffield Digital website.
But this also means that our startup phase is now complete, and while we are increasingly well supported by our membership, the time has come to put the organisation on a properly sustainable footing and for Mel and I to step back from some of the day-to-day activity that has taken up much of our time and head-space. I will still be representing Sheffield Digital wherever I can, attending meetings with policy makers, writing pieces on tech policy, and organising the Policy Conflab and SmartSheffield events, but I may not be as active on social media and Slack as I have been.
This also means that I will have more time to dedicate to new projects, and so am now actively looking for work. I will have 3 to 4 days per week of availability going forward, so if anyone is looking for an experienced hand in any of the areas below, please get in touch!
▷ Digital Technology Strategy/Policy/Transformation Management.
▷ Digital Project/Programme/Product Management.
▷ Innovation Processes, Culture, Portfolio Management.
▷ Digital and Innovation Capacity Building.
▷ Horizon Scanning, Technology Roadmapping.
▷ Stakeholder Management and Network Building.
▷ Business Planning, Commercial Contracts and Bid Writing.
▷ Team Leadership and Line Management.
▷ Facilitation, Workshopping, Conference Production.
I'm particularly interested in working on smart city projects, or initiatives that aim to disrupt work practices, especially in public sector or professional services, and especially using automation, AI, shared coordination platforms and co-design.
I don’t do digital marketing strategy, brand or media, really, unless it’s part of something wider. I’m most interested in using technology to deliver value to people by helping them transact, collaborate or learn something. Always by reducing their cognitive load, ideally by a lot.
I’m also very happy to support or mentor existing teams or managers on a regular basis, e.g. half a day per month, or similar. And I can work with agencies to help them develop their clients’ capabilities as well.
I’m willing to commute within an hour or so of Sheffield, or further if it’s for just one or two days per week, or I can work remotely of course.
I’m fairly flexible around price - it depends on the type of work, length of contract, and interestingness. I am definitely cheaper than the major consultancies, and I can bring a very large network of expertise to bear despite being independent.
Essentially, if you are of a reasonable size and are looking to change how you operate, or how a city works, using digital technology I may well be able to help you. :)
Email me at [email protected], or hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Notes from Meetup #12: IoT for Citizens
What a lovely meetup we had on Monday!
Despite the dark evenings, and miserable weather we had a full turnout of people, many of whom were new participants, who witnessed some great talks around IoT and engagement with people in the city.
Several people commented to me on how much they enjoyed the format of the evening as well as the speakers, and it really felt like the format was back to what Matt and I originally envisaged when we designed the SmartSheffield meetup over two years(!!) ago now: a relaxed arrival, introductions from everyone present, four good and concise talks followed by some news, and then food, drinks and good chats for at least an hour afterwards.
This time it really worked, and we think the biggest difference (apart from the speakers sticking to time, which was most excellent and appreciated!) is that we didn’t allow any Q&A. Usually we take a few questions and tell speakers that there will be 5 minutes Q&A at the end of the talks, but in practice this means that over-long talks then go on for even longer. Q&As are valuable of course, but ultimately we think conversation is more valuable, and so we asked people to talk to the speakers once we break for food - that way they can ask more in depth questions, and there will be more time to get into deeper conversations as there is a full hour to do so - or even slightly more if we let it carry on past 9pm, which as people were still having such a good time and the conversations were so fruitful, we did this time!
Anyway, this is how we intend to continue next year - we hope everyone is on board!
Here are the night’s talks:
Joe Dreimann on teaching IoT in Schools
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By day Joe is the User Experience Lead at big data company WANdisco, but by night (well by evenings and the odd weekend), he guides the efforts of the educational foundation set up by WANdisco’s founder David Richards and his wife Jane.
The foundation’s mission is to bring a new kind of computing education to secondary school pupils - one which focuses on the technologies and skills that are still emerging in the industry, rather than those that are well established. In in other words the capabilities that are going to be relevant, rather than “legacy skills”.
The foundation is trialling their new curriculum with Tapton School this school year, before rolling out to other local schools in the future, and, as Joe explains, the first term which is coming to an end covered data science, the next term in the new year is looking at the Internet of Things, and how to build infrastructure and applications.
The foundation is keen for more employers to get involved with setting the curriculum and defining project work for the pupils to undertake, and he is especially interested in input from the SmartSheffield community to make the content ‘more real’; i.e. closer to the work and thinking of real practitioners in the IoT space. What should they bring to the classroom, or what should they take the classroom to see?
Please watch Joe’s presentation to get a better idea of what they are doing, and get in touch with him at this address: [email protected]
Damian Bemben, Megan Naylor and Kyle McLean on explaining the Urban Flows Observatory to the public
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Damian, Megan and Kyle are all members of the University of Sheffield’s Engineering Leadership Academy (SELA), and are currently leading a project with the Urban Flows Observatory to increase their outreach activities and get the general public engaged in what the Observatory is doing.
As regulars will know, the Urban Flows Observatory is project run by the Universities of Sheffield, Newcastle and Bristol to attempt to measure the city’s “energy metabolism” using a range of sensors some of which are incorporated into a mobile platform - a van called Moebius.
You can see more about the Observatory here and here (including the famous meetup nearly 2 years ago where Martin Mayfield sent us the project outline presentation but then couldn't make the meetup, so we collectively tried to interpret what it was al about just from his slides! I’ve often thought we should do that more often :-D)
The Observatory has an essential mandate to engage with stakeholders and the general public, “so that they understand [the Observatory's] purpose, have confidence in the techniques employed and therefore have confidence in the data produced, which will provide an evidence base for future policy-making.”
For their part, the SELA students are particularly looking to engage with school children, and through them the parents as well. To do this they have distilled their brief down to three specific objectives and two modes of engagement, as follows:
Promote the observatory’s activites
Raise awareness of how data can enable decisions
Incorporate the internet of things as an enabling area of technology
The two modes of engagement are targeted at different groups of stakeholders, and will be:
A ‘roadshow’ that takes Moebius to schools and communities to introduce the observatory to them and show how it all works and what it’s used for.
A web / mobile app that shows the user environmental readings at various locations, triggered by QR codes around the city.
The team are seeking input and advice from the SmartSheffield community as these plans shape up, especially around using IoT for public engagement.
Content the team at this email address: [email protected]
Zak Ahmed on Sheffield as a playable city, and the AR’ City festival
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Zak runs a social enterprise called Aalfy, based in a former post office at 108 The Moor, and which provides an alternative path into education for young people for whom the system, or circumstances, just haven’t worked. They have been responsible for a number of great initiatives over the years, including Learn Create Sell which shows people how to make new things with laser cutters, and provides them with a route to market for their creations.
Zak came to our May meetup earlier this year and, inspired by my talk on Play, Creativity and Co-creation in the smart city, set out to build a new programme called AR’ City around the playable city concept, “using play as a way of connecting with citizens, [it] aims to add memorable experiences in our everyday moments on the high street.”.
This resulted in a successful six week engagement in partnership with the Architecture department at the University of Sheffield, in which 48 young people developed 16 playable city concepts and worked with technologists to prototype three of them.
Zak is looking to take this experience further, and is currently planning a two week festival for next September: AR’ City Sheffield, in which more of the concepts are converted into real playable experiences in the city centre.
Zak is looking for collaborators, sponsors and technical experts who can work with the cohorts of young people to help them realise their ideas (or tell them when things are too expensive or straight impossible!).
Please watch Zak’s terrific story and get in touch with him at [email protected]
Tracey Johnson on Barnsley’s journey from Coal to Code
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Tracey is the director of Barnsley’s Digital Media Centre, and has been at the heart of developing the digital tech sector in the town. She tells the story of this activity and how the pace of change has picked up over the last three years, especially with their involvement in the European URBACT: Tech Towns programme, which looked at what an ecosystem needs in order for the tech economy to thrive, and how that has now led to a raft of new initiatives, including:
The new Barnsley Digital Campus.
IoT Tribe North accelerator (which is now open for the second cohort).
Leading the Digital Manufacturing agenda.
“Skunkworks” internal incubator at Barnsley Council.
Barnsley.io maker group.
The Connected Lab.
Beyond this immediate action plan, they know they also need to build their skills pipelines, provide more spaces for experimentation and incubation, and develop more cross-sectoral collaborations. And they know physical infrastructure is not enough, but that human capital and support is crucial. As Tracey sees it, it is about “bringing together digital people, learning and business across a connected campus of places and spaces both online and offline to deliver more and better jobs and businesses.”
If anyone would like to get involved in any of Barnsley’s programmes, get in touch with Tracey at: [email protected]
Chris Dymond: SmartSheffield News
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I finished off the talkie bit of the evening, as always, by drawing attention to relevant smart city-esque things I’ve become aware of recently:
The Kollider technology hub at Castle House is progressing, with the National Video Museum opening last weekend, and other floors scheduled to come on stream early in the new year. They are building 9 ‘centres of excellence’ in different technology and market verticals, including one called “Intelligent Environments”, which covers smart city and IoT applications.
governance.SHF is the latest dotSHF domain to spark into life, along with people.SHF (which is planning a social care and universal credit summit in the Spring) and economy.SHF which also meets regularly. dotSHF is the city’s digital coalition, and brings together stakeholders and interested parties across seven city domains. The governance domain was initiated with a workshop on public sector challenges, facilitated by Future Gov, about which you can read here.
It’s Our City is a non-political network of Sheffield residents who are working together to affect change in the city, including the desire to make the city more democratic in its decision making. I highlight them here as an opportunity to explore how technology and data might fit into this agenda and in the hope there could be common cause.
All twenty of the refurbished Gas Destructor Lamps have now been restored to their original settings around Sheffield. They are a real tangible piece of Sheffield’s history of technological urban innovation.
Breastfeeding in Sheffield is aiming to make the city the most breastfeeding friendly city in the country for new mothers, and have encouraged the council to open a dedicated breastfeeding room in the Town Hall, and other rooms around the city. Is there an opportunity to provide applications both to help people find them, and let others know if they are good to use?
The Sheffield Park Project is another grass-roots project to build an information resource in the city, this time around Sheffield’s green spaces (of which there are 850 under management by the city council!). Their app is nearly ready for testing, and you can register to get a link to it if you would like to help them get it to launch.
As I mentioned in September, ShopAppy is trying to make it more convenient for people to shop locally by providing a simple mobile interface and aggregated fulfilment and collection. It is also based in Yorkshire, and is currently active in some small towns, including Barnsley, but it would be interesting to see if it can gain a foothold in Sheffield perhaps by covering individual neighbourhoods first.
Sheffield Things Network is now up to 14 gateways in Sheffield (alright, four of them are in Chesterfield ;) and 31 contributors. If you would like to get involved in building a community-owned LoRaWAN network and building applications for it, please join the community!
And that was it!
Have a lovey Christmas everyone, and we look forward to more meetups in the new year!
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Notes from Meetup #10: Connecting with Citizens
The May Meetup took place on Monday the 14th May, on an absolutely gorgeous Summer evening, and was titled “Connecting with Citizens” to reflect the theme of citizen engagement in smart cities activities. This is an area that really should be at the core of the agenda, and given the wealth of tools available and the design creativity that we can draw on in Sheffield there shouldn’t be any excuse for it not to be.
However, public engagement is often hard and can be risky. It sometimes seems as if the people trying to deploy new technology and services are too introverted and find it emotionally difficult to engage and connect with citizens, let alone allow them into the design process.
In this edition we hoped to present some examples and strategies to make this process less fraught, and to give the community more confidence to take initiatives out into the city.
Here’s what was discussed…
Chris Dymond on Play, Creativity and Co-creation in Smart Cities
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As an introduction to the evening’s topic, Chris talked about the inclusion theme contained in the 2015 SmartSheffield report and specifically highlighted two of the sub-themes, namely “Creativity and Play” and “Citizen-led Design”.
He drew attention to the Playable Cities movement, and the people who are engaging citizens in playful activities and experiences that allow them to interact with and explore their city in new ways. By way of example he showed the Urbanimals project that took place in Bristol in 2015.
He then took a few minutes to explore co-design processes, by referencing the Citizen Canvas workshopping method, designed by Design for Social Change, whereby citizens walk around their neighbourhoods observing, noting and discussing different problems and then collaboratively design solutions to these issues using available resources, and describe the solutions on the canvas.
He also drew attention to the current dock land project in Toronto, which is being developed by Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, and has announced what is probably the largest citizen engagement initiative ever in order to build the new smart district in partnership with local residents.
Having demonstrated play as a way to get citizens engaged with their place, and co-design workshops as a way to get citizens involved in developing solutions, he presented the Open Citizens project which was a project lead by post-digital art studio Ludic Rooms for Coventry's bid to be the UK’s City of Culture last year. This project involved inviting creative suggestions from 1000s of citizens for things to make the dirty more enjoyable to be in, then inviting the originators of the best ideas to collaborate in prototyping workshops, showcasing the best prototypes in an art exhibition and then actually building the final five and making them available to the city to play with. These included “Scream if you Want to go faster” - noise activated electric scooters - and Nod Bins that burp and react in other ways when people put litter in them.
Finally, Chris raised a number of challenges for people to think about:
How could playable city projects be made more permanent?
How could they be made to scale?
How could creativity and play be integrated into large-scale smart city projects, rather than just being an addition?
Mark Goddard on Paper Studio’s engagement work with Dot Everyone
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Mark talks about how Sheffield based user research and design studio Paper have been working with technology ethics think tank DotEveryone to encourage people to engage with and think about emerging issues arising from digital technologies such as AI, data privacy and social media.
Paper designed new engagement methods, whereby people were presented with a scenarios in which there is a ministry of technology, and they are taken through a series of policy options and impacts around specific issues. For instance the implications of “social scoring”, whether access to the internet is a right or a privilege or whether artificial intelligences should declare their identity before interacting with humans.
Paper trialled these engagements in person, by hosting a series of workshops and using board games, and remotely, by creating a website for the Ministry for Technology and asking users to place themselves in the shoes of a policy maker and respond to a series of dilemmas.
Over the course of this trial they found noticeable changes in the way people respond to particular issues, with a high proportion of people changing their states opinions over the course of the engagement.
Mark explains how important these approaches are, not just for understanding public perceptions of things, but also to increase public understanding of complex topics, which in turn may help the adoption of new technologies and ways of doing things, which is at the heart of the smart city agenda.
Jorge Garcia on Smart City App Stores
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Jorge explains how Smart World Connect’s City App Store platforms help citizens engage with their city by surfacing applications and services, and providing access that people would otherwise struggle to find.
Jorge goes through the kinds of city application that can be made available, from job-seeking to smart parking, from childcare provision to volunteering, and then explains how return on investment is generated via targeted push notifications, revenue from which can be shared with the local authority or whatever city body that establishes the platform.
Smart World Connect were awarded Startup of the Year for 2018 by Innovate UK, and their business extends from providing the App Store platform itself, to developing the city apps themselves, leveraging the personalisation APIs through the platform. This is intended to allow developments made in other cities to be shared and creates a viable commercial platform for local app developers.
The talk sparked a lot of questions and debate around quality assurance, data privacy, surveillance and the real value of targeted advertising in cities.
Tim Woolliscroft on Smart Health Communities
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Tim returned to discuss the outcomes from his PhD research into the effectiveness of ‘smart communities’ in supporting people affected by cancer, and whether such enabled communities could bring about improved health outcomes.
He explained what is meant by smart communities: groups of people who live in close proximity and are connected through digital services and communications platforms. He also explored the relationship between smart communities and smart cities, and made the point that smart cities are often characterised by top-down initiatives, with the intent to deploy technologies and expect their adoption often with little consultation, while smart communities form organically when people in a local area adopt certain tools and behaviours.
He then looks at how these different contexts affect health outcomes, comparing top-down, data-oriented approaches to more human-centred, empowered, community based ones, and concludes that while the smart community model has the potential to be very effective, it is likely to be so only in certain specific circumstances.
Finally Tim also explains that one of the reasons for conducting this research was to encourage people to collaborate with him on further research, and extends this invitation to all members of the SmartSheffield community.
SmartSheffield News
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As always, the event finished with Chris running through the most recent happenings in Sheffield’s the smart city ecosystem. This time he highlighted the following items:
dotSHF, Sheffield's Digital Coalition, which now has a coordinator - Chris Lowry.
Sheffield's 5G Urban Testbed bid.
Kollider, the new K1 meanwhile space and the arrival of the National Videogame Arcade.
Urban Flows sensor competition - final pitches.
Sheffield Green City Strategy.
Sheffield State of Nature Report.
Sheffield and Rotherham Air Quality Strategy.
Sheffield Things Network - 1st Smart City IoT Hackathon was a success.
Pitch-In project - Promoting the Internet of Things via Collaborations between HEIs and Industry awarded £4m.
GDPR things.
And that was it, the SmartSheffield Meetup is now on hiatus over the Summer and will return in September (hopefully!).
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Notes from Meetup #9: The Things Network Takeover (Part 1)
In March we had a Things Network Takeover, where we invited people from across the North who are involved with The Things Network (TTN). This is a community-owned and operated Internet of Things network based on LoRa technology, which means it has very long range, low energy consumption and low bandwidth - it’s really a so-called ‘chirp’ network where low power devices out in the environment can take periodic measurements and then communicate them in tiny packets of information (as little as 12 bytes at a time) back via gateways to a central data store.
The Things Network started in a hackspace in Amsterdam in 2015, and now has over 30,000 members around the world. It also makes its own networking hardware, following a successful Kickstarter project. There are TTN communities all over the UK, and there is now a move to bring the northern ones closer together to share knowledge and work on joint projects under the Things North banner.
The Sheffield Things Network is also part of this, and is building a LoRaWAN network across our city, and looking to run some hacks in order to get more people building applications for the network - watch this space!
Anyway, thanks everyone for coming to the event, and especially to Roy Woodhead for pulling it together and getting so many great people gathered in one room - it’s great to see the network come together across the North.
We had eight speakers in total, which I think may be a record - here’s part 1 of the event notes, with the first four speakers. The second set of four are in the next post...
Patrick Fenner - defproc Engineering and The Things Network Liverpool
Patrick runs a digital design and engineering company in Liverpool, called DefProc Engineering, and is the instigator of the Things Network Liverpool.
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Patrick tells the story of his involvement with LoRaWAN and the projects that have spring from that involvement, since the first gateway went live in his Liverpool office almost exactly two years ago. He describes the tools and technologies he has used, from designing the gateway for remote monitoring and software updates, to building more, installing them and hosting hackathons to encourage other people to build devices that utilize the network. He explains how quickly things have evolved and the many new gateway options that have materialised since he started.
His ambition going forward is to explain to non-technical people what the point is - what can be done with this technology and how useful it is, using the analogy of bluetooth, which people were similarly unaware of ten years ago.
Defproc have themselves explored several IoT use cases, including a simple humidity monitor, with a dashboard.
Patrick is now looking for other ways of using the technology, and is pleased to be a consortium partner on Liverpool's 5G Test Bed, where they will be deploying a 'push to talk' service to address isolation and loneliness. This involves an elderly person pushing a LoRaWAN-enabled button, and then receiving a phone call from another person who initiated the push to talk system - in other words connecting isolated people in the city without a centrally managed service.
The 5G testbed funding will allow them to set up an additional ten gateways, with 5G backhaul, covering large areas of the city.
Visit the Things Network Liverpool community page.
Julian Tait - Open Data Manchester and The Things Network Manchester
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In the first part of his talk, Julian explained what Open Data Manchester do, particularly around the events and workshops they run on data and open infrastructures. The next one will be about land use, using land registry data. They also look at new data practices and standards, and are very interested in the Internet of Things, particularly regarding data ethics and the collection of data through sensors in the environment.
Julian then presented two projects they are currently working on that involve the Things Network:
The Knowable Building Framework looks at how sensor networks can be installed in older buildings in order to provide the benefits of modern sensor installations to those landlords. Beyond the technical challenge, the project looks at how you might create a consensual approach to placing sensors in an environment where you have many different people using the building's spaces.
The building they are using for this project is Federation House, and The Things Network allows the installation of sensors in a non-invasive way, i.e. with no need for cabling. A single gateway was placed in the building, and the sensors were also able to connect to other gateways in the centre of manchester.
Julian explained how they analysed the sensor data in order to identify where savings could be made, and that these savings provided the business case for the project. He then went on to describe how they re-analysed the data to focus on behaviour, and how this can present security or privacy risks. And finally, they looked at how sensors exist in buildings, how visible they are, how they interact with building users (for instance detecting the MAC address on a person's phone), and where the data is stored.
The second project is one that maps pollution and school locations in Greater Manchester, and seeks to help those schools measure and understand the dynamics of pollution that affect them, in the process helping school students learn about sensor networks, analysing data and communicating the knowledge that can be gained from it. The intention is them to work with the GroundWork Trust, to see if air quality can be improved in schools by using planting to mitigate the problem.
Visit the Things Network Manchester community page.
Simon Redding - Spire Digital and The Things Network Chesterfield
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Simon explained how he and Simon Nieder are working out of a small community incubator and co-working space called Monkey Works in Chesterfield to develop Things Network projects.
He described Chesterfield’s geography and how they are trying to understand the use case and application areas of the Things Network in a market town.
First of course, they need a network and are building an initial network of 4 gateways which should cover most of the town, with a population of around 100,000 people.
They are working on the following use cases:
Footfall and flow in the town centre.
The cycle network.
Air quality (there is currently only one air quality sensor in the town, and it isn’t where the pollution is).
Flood sensing, in collaboration with the Canal Trust.
Social care and tele-medicine.
Security.
Simon then talks at length about the hardware they have been experimenting with, both gateways and nodes.
Visit the Things Network Chesterfield community page.
Matt Brailsford - Outfield Digital, Barnsley IO and The Things Network Barnsley
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Matt runs Outfield Digital, an Umbraco web development agency, with his wife Lucy, as well as the Barnley.io hacker community and The Things Network Barnsley.
Matt only set up TTN Barnsley a few months ago, but already have 3 gateways in the field and can already tell that it will take quite a few more to cover the whole town given it’s topography.
Matt’s advice to other communities is to bring in expertise from other places and people who have already done things, and to build connections with local firms and organisations who can support the effort. The Barnsley Digital Media Centre has played an enormous role in getting the effort off the ground, and through them Matt has been able to open other avenues of support. Grass-roots efforts are hard to get going, but if you can find the right people in positions of authority to support it, then everything becomes much easier.
This includes the local council, who have commissioned one of the gateways to experiment with the potential uses of the technology. TTN has also been a positive force at the Barnsley.io maker space as it has provided a focus and application area for users of the space to learn and get involved in.
Matt’s advice is to be persistent - you don’t need to be a technical expert, often the people who make community efforts work are the ones who keep poking and pushing to make things happen.
Finally, they have a saying: “If you want something to work, buy it. If you want something to lear, build it” - and the approach TTN Barnsley have taken is the latter. Build your own devices in order to really understand how the technology works, and how they can be improved.
Visit the Things Network Barnsley community page.
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