Open Government & Digital City

The Nexa Center is involved in several projects and other activities concerning the Smart City domain. The fil rouge of this involvement is a strong attention to the role and rights of citizens.

The Nexa Center participates in the SMILE (Smart Mobility, Inclusion, Life&Health, Energy) project. Coordinated for the City of Turin by the Torino Wireless Foundation, SMILE is a strategic project, aiming at involving several key stakeholders in the definition of the domains and long terms goals of Torino as a Smart City.

The activities of SMILE are divided by “tables” and the Nexa Center sits in the Integration table, which aim at providing some overarching principles and assets to the other, sector specific, tables. Moreover, the Politecnico di Torino takes part in the Inclusion table and Nexa provided its input to the overall contribution from the Politecnico. Such input was focused on the use of open data for a stronger involvement of citizens in the governance of the City.

Within the Integration table of the SMILE initiative, together with other participants (in particular, CSI Piemonte), the Nexa Center supported the proposal of creating an overall governance structure for the data produced by Torino as a smart city. This, of course, taking into account the warnings that the Center raised within the SMILE Inclusion table. There, the Nexa Center offered its expertise, concerning in particular the legislative framework, and stressed the importance of considering, together with the potential of reusing the stream of data generated by a digital city, the impact of such flow of data on the privacy of citizens.

On the same vein, i.e., in order to avoid a vision of the smart city as the “city of surveillance”, the Nexa Center started a fruitful interacting with 5T, which is the organization managing the majority of the data concerning the mobility of Turin (e.g., traffic sensors, parkings, public transport data, etc.). Coordinated by Alessandro Mantelero, various Nexa fellows analyzed and commented the plan concerning the management of the data flow produced by the new Piedmont Integrated Ticket (BIP) travel smart card, which will collect data generated by the customers of more than one hundred public and private firms.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that various Nexa fellows joined a series of dinner discussion salons to support the development of smart city manifesto. The “Urban Media Salon on Smart City Manifesto” initiative is led by Simona Lodi, Mirjam Struppek and Simone Arcagni and it also received various inputs during the 51st Nexa Wednesday and provided the main topic for the following meeting.