The Smart City Monitor is the open digital platform for local communities to make the life of its Citizens easier, enhance and enrich its content. The platform has a large set of technical options to provide citizens with real time information improving quality of life, assisting in the daily activities and relations between the Citizen and the City. The features are implemented by personal online dashboards, maps, diagrams, charts, various widgets and reports presenting City Life map on common mobile and computer devices. In all these cases the information is interactive and available anyplace in real time if networking is available.

Receiving the information about ongoing city life

There are several smart options providing citizens with information for their daily life.  

Finding services or resources: The citizens and tourists can find necessary active performing services or resources in the city anytime e.g. within some distance from the target location. The information includes current status and details of processes taking places in the service or object of interest and relevant latest events.

The information is made available by the private and public service providers e.g. services shops, repair businesses, etc as well as city administration and reveal current service status like ”Open” or “Closed” along with the concrete quantitative details about the service performance at the moment of inquiry e.g.

• Our restaurant has now 7 free tables and 5 free parking slots now. (Timestamp: 19:45:21 2015-09-28”). The same type of information can be provided by other services e.g. fast repair service, sport events, public concerts, etc)
• The estimating number of people in the queue is 19. The expected waiting time is 20 min. (Timestamp: 19:45:21 2015-09-28)
• We have now 5 cashers serving our customers with average waiting time 1,5 min. (Timestamp: 19:45:21 2015-09-28)
• Actual number of students per one teacher in mathematics in the school “Y” today is 19”
• The number of passengers in our public transportation system at this moment of time 2,463.

     Clinic “Quick Recovery Now”: 

• Number specialists in department “Blood tests” on service today are 2. 
• Lag time between analysis and availability of results is 13 min. (Timestamp: 19:45:21 2015-09-28)

Online inquiries examples:

• Where are parking places with at least 3 free slots available now near that particular location Lang/Long? What are the prices in each place? (the citizen clicks on city map or use own mobile phone to identify own location)
• Where are the hotels with at least 1 double room within 1 km from the location with the Latitude and Longitude? What are prices?
• When and where kids events for ages between 7 and 10 will take place during next week end?
• What is the status of activities and performance in this public service (e.g. school, hospital, fire brigade, etc)?

City performance

• The use of water per person in our city (or by each of its districts) is 309,3 liters/person
• Current number of busses which serve you in our city is 99 with average 7 persons in each.

The level of details in such information is limited only by the data streams which particular service provider can or able or willing to forward to the city server and city public information policy and national legislation. It may include any detail accordingly the provider in-house performance management system and its relevant technical facilities e.g. video streams to performance data illustrating on-going services, sales, and related parking places.

City transportation departments can provide own public performance data regarding key transportation routes, number of passengers and traffic congestions on particular street/crossroads, public transport service levels on the City Life map.

Checking actual arrival time for the next passenger vehicle (bus, train, etc): The citizens who plan to commute or wait for a bus may have online information about actual expected arrival of the bus to particular place or stop and expected transfer time. It could be important information in many real life cases considering bad weather options, day time, various public events in the city which may influence changes in generic route schedule.

Checking authorization for public works: Citizens can easily check online if particular city activities were authorized by the city administration e.g. road repair on crossroad streets X/Y, water pipe maintenance, cabling in location Z, bus route change, visits of relevant service representatives to their houses, etc. As option the citizens can be offered to provide relevant comments to city administration in standard online evaluation forms which allows having evaluation of results, its automatic processing and adding to the city performance dashboards.

Obtaining automatic notifications about traffic status:  While driving on the specific route the drivers may be warned about congestions and advised with rerouting options.

Knowing what’s going on: by subscribing for city events and news using the tags as topics of interest the citizens can obtain focused information e.g.

• Inform me about events for children age 7-10 which are related to games, performances, and violin.
• I want to have all information about city fireworks, fun & entertainments within next week.
• Let me know when there are free places in sport club X, etc.

The subscriber will be notified automatically when any event organizer publishes its plan of performances. The service event providers are authorized and monitored by the City administration.

These examples present only minor number of options which can be realized in the integrated Smart City Monitor solution.

Contributing to city life and its collaborative economy

The Smart City Monitor platform can support connecting distributed groups of people to make better use of goods, skills and space. While the options are numerous it can be illustrated by the following examples:

Resource sharing: The owner of a resource e.g. a car or a transportation vehicle, tools and equipment for construction, repair instruments, bikes, apartments, etc. willing to share it may publish the event with the reference to the location, brief description and conditions. Each such event is distributed to those citizens who are subscribed for the topic notifications and can get first hand details about the offer. The notifications can be filtered by additional conditions e.g. limiting maximum distance to the sharing location, e.g. “within 500 m from my home” making recipient sure receiving only relevant information.

In case of car pooling the owner may formulate the route, time of departure, have responses from those co-passengers who commute to the same direction and immediately send them confirmations. 

City transportation providers may use the same Smart City Monitor resource sharing instruments to implement optimized transportation routes using geolocations of citizens published requests for transportation and waiting for transfer, e.g. at nights. 

Increased responsibility:  If a citizen or a business service provider publishes the event at official City Life portal “Smart City Monitor” then the content shall corresponds to the City information exchange policies and national legislation and the author shall be authorized. It provides additional safety records for example for passengers which accepted the offer for carpooling and at the same time increases responsibility of the service/shared resource provider.

Sharing the knowledge of citizens

The city platform provides the citizens and the City with instruments to share their knowledge in the interests of community and contribute to city life. It may include the following:

Sending notification and proposal about identified problems as major issues of concern for residents, e.g. abandoned urban spaces, road pits, fallen tree, cable, water leak, street light on during daytime, unregistered repair service in the building or on road, accident, fire, fight, crime, etc.

The technical implementation is easy and simple: Make picture by own mobile with GPS geolocation, identify problem tag, add possible text or voice comments and send the event to the Smart City server for prompt processing and response actions by relevant City management.

Posting information about thematic community events, e.g. formal and informal meetings, food markets (subject to City publication policies) with automatic notifications to all subscribers.

Crowd sourcing data: Along with environmental measurements made by city and official state agencies the citizens can use own low-cost sensors e.g. IoT to measure their local environments and stream the measurement data to the maps of City Life contributing to open data. The new variety of new sensoring application options in mobile phones and add-on devices can supplement to city-wide sensor networks.

Viewing city environmental dimensions

Smart City Monitor allows citizens to monitor environmental situation in their urban and metropolitan areas. It includes maps of pollution such as NOx, CO2 or noise, traffic, accidents and congestions, abnormal events, etc based on available measurement data sets and sensor locations e.g. in residence areas, kindergartens, schools, sport facilities, etc.

The mapping feature helps citizens viewing any open data available in the city's information bases including historic data and its change overtime, various events, animations of real city developments   and growth.

Collective intelligence: The platform supports citizens getting involved in policymaking, planning and budgeting, helping make smarter and more democratic decisions in local governance. It facilitates problem solving by citizens using online tools that let people debate ideas and decide which of them get implemented rather than simply asking for suggestions.  

Community projects and city governments can use the instruments for crowd funding of collaboratively formulated and selected projects to make spending decisions that more accurately reflect the needs and wishes of citizens.

Citizens can access open data and finding productive uses for the data to create innovative solutions to urban challenges, bringing businesses, community groups and city governments together to develop new ways of using city data.

The spirit of confidence 

The implementation of Smart City Monitor as official source of the City Life performance and events increases confidence by citizens and tourists, quality and culture of business services and attract investors.