4th Workshop on geogames and geoplay co-organized by UJI Geo-C

30th May 2017 geoc

The 20th international conference on geographic information science – Agile 2017 hosted at Wageningen, The Netherlands, was the perfect space to exchange and discuss ideas about games, playfulness, gamification and geospatial technologies at the Fourth workshop on geogames and geoplay co-organized by GEOTEC (Geo-C) and the Geogames team from University of Bamberg, the thematic focus defined for the workshop was “Gamifying the Open Smart City”.

The Five selected papers explored a wide range of concepts related to this research field, from the use of the serious games approach for gathering critical spatial thinking, an agent-based simulation framework for geogrames, to three different available geogames (NavApps, Smart Beetles, and BioDiv2Go). The hands on session allowed to shape one experiment from the GEO-C (www.geo-c-eu) european project aiming to promote cycling as a feasible commuting mode combining gamification and geographical information sciences.

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

25th May 2017 geoc

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:

What are the main challenges in e-participation and smart cities to engage in the urban planning process?
How ICT can facilitate citizens participation in complex scenarios that demand discussion, debate, and finally decision-making?
What do people expect from e-participation platforms?

Some pictures are attached from the day:

CfP Workshop @ ECIS2017: Opening Smart Cities: Challenges to engage citizens through information systems

7th March 2017 geoc

We, some of the ESRs from the “GEO-C – Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities” project, would like to invite you to our half-day pre-conference workshop part of the 25th Annual European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2017). This workshop entitled “Opening Smart Cities: Challenges to engage citizens through information systems” aims to explore and discuss the potential of information systems to engage citizens in the development of smart cities through e-participation technologies.

The session will take place on June 6, 2017, in conjunction with the ECIS 2017 in Guimarães, Portugal. The deadlines for short papers (max. 2000 words) submissions are on April 3, 2017 and we encourage you to submit your paper as a .pdf to us, along with the authors’ names and contact details to geoc3.ecis@gmail.com. The main topics we will address will be:

E-participation in smart cities
Citizen engagement platforms in smart cities
Open data and governance towards open and inclusive cities
Participatory and critical design in urban decision-making processes
New kinds of interaction between citizens and other stakeholders in open cities
Different performance of citizens on using ICT for e-participation: gender, age, education, etc
Reflections for e-participation: Best practices, failures & practical challenges.

We are looking forward to your submission!
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Smart City Expo, perspective from geospatial researchers

5th December 2016 geoc

Attending the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) is a common desire within ITC-related professionals and researchers, you find in a single place all commercial solutions, some customers showing their own experience with Smart City projects, some Experts discussing about future trends, and academics interested on meeting “Real” products to feed their own research.

Between thousands of attendees there were seven Geotec members walking through Europa Fira, listening to interesting and motivational speeches, while digging into multiple ideas from entrepreneurs, local government agents, young researchers and well-known companies.

Most remarkable issues there at the Expo were related to:circular economy, sustainable mobility, open data and artificial intelligence. Regarding there were…

Discussion about Sustainable Mobility was a full track on the agenda, and walking/cycling experiences were presented everywhere, a mix of mobile apps, infrastructure plan, sharing/rented projects were presented. Main tendency is to have less private individual vehicles and more public and shared bicycles, therefore cycling infrastructure will be part of this transformation. The session “Walkable and cyclable cities” easily resumes those innitiatives.

SCEWC2016 offered a rich set of keynote speakers, but Parag Kanna’s presentation about connected cities had an important effect on attendees, his map-based speech showed future trends on urbanization and development of future cities (also smart). With a global view of connections he explained briefly how the world is showing us tendencies that must be attended, with his web tool those tendencies could be explored and analyzed.

Another interesting Keynote, gave by Susan Etlinger, was about how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can be implemented in new solutions for cities, enhancing new developments such as image recognition, self-driving cars and conversational assistants.

Finally, the importance of sharing economy and governance of the city commons was presented by David Bollier. This alternative forms of creating economical development is rising on cities like Barcelona, looking to strengthen local business and entrepreneurship.

Prof. Michael Gould presented the preliminary results of the ESR07 project in the “Solutions for More Inclusive and Participative Cities (elevator pitch format)” track.

A full three days event is always exhausting, but attending during different days as a group will allow to identify multiple trends and development, this exercise helped Geotec on having a global look at state-of-the-art commercial solutions for Smart Cities.

ESR were also in contact with local partners from the program. Castellón City Hall representatives were present at the event, looking for solutions to improve the city. Also ESR15 shared experiences in the Urbiotica’s stand, who presented its solution to different stakeholders.

(*) Geotec Researches who attended the Smart City Expo: Fernando Benitez (ESR11), David Frias, Khoi Ngo (ESR06), Diego Pajarito (ESR07), Manuel Portela (ESR15), Luis Rodriguez, Sergi Trilles, Michael Gould.