Day: 25th May 2017

GEO-C @CeDEM2017- E-participation in the Urban Planning Process: Challenges to be addressed by ICT

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The proceedings of the 7th international conference for E-democracy and open government held at the Danube University Krems 17-19 May 2017 (CeDEM2017). It invites individuals from academic and applied background as well as business, public authorities, NGOs, NPOS and education insititution to submit papers and join the discussion on topics and issues related to e-democracy and open government.
GEO-C organized an interactive workshop by using lego blocks to create self-awareness about the challenges of citizens participation through ICT in urban planning. During workshop session Lego blocks were used to represent different scenarios of public participation in the urban planning process, first at the individual level and then in groups. With the guidance of the organizers, the attendees’ discussion were mainly around the questions as follows:
  1. What are the main challenges in e-participation and smart cities to engage in the urban planning process?
  2. How ICT can facilitate citizens participation in complex scenarios that demand discussion, debate, and finally decision-making?
  3. What do people expect from e-participation platforms?
Some pictures are attached from the day:

Research colloquia: “Running a virtual, cloud-based company for sensor-based air and water monitoring”

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Dr. Edward Pultar is visiting one week in May. He is a former visiting scholar at UJI and founding member of Valarm.net (http://www.valarm.net/), an entirely cloud-based company managed together with his brother. How can a self-funding, bootstrapped company, manage international customers around the world? What is their business model? What is the trick? VAlarm is basically a software as a service company. Software is the main product. They sometimes sell the hardware solutions, because some customers demand a single provider to manage sw&hw together. In other cases, they create software tools, APIs and real-time dashboards for existing hardware when customers already possess their sensors. So, Valarm provides cloud-based software tools for remotely monitoring industrial IoT systems and sensors. Look at the customer stories (http://www.valarm.net/customer-stories/) for really real-life IoT deployments and successful use cases.

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