Dublin 2020: a Dublin resident – let’s call her Anna – leaves her office and as she boards the Luas she scans the latest news headlines that have been downloaded wirelessly to her handheld computer.

Sitting across from her, visitors take a virtual tour of Dublin on their smartphone to help plan their day’s excursion.

Getting off the Luas near her home, she spots a flickering street lamp. She takes a photo with her mobile and sends it to Dublin City Council where it will be processed and a repair team dispatched within 48 hours.

There are more than a million stories in the capital city and this could be one of them.

Many of the technologies to enable scenarios such as this are already in development and Ireland is playing a lead role in an EU project examining similar applications.

The €5m project is called ICING (Innovative Cities for the Next Generation) and is funded through the EU Sixth Framework programme. The programme involves city councils, universities and telecoms operators to develop a system for citizen access to city administration. Dublin is one of three European cities taking part, along with Barcelona and Helsinki.

It was the focus of the Cities of Knowledge conference held last week at Clontarf Castle, where international speakers gathered to discuss the issues involved.

Additional kudos for Ireland is in Dublin Institute of Technology’s role as overall co-ordinator for ICING. It manages the entire project from its Digital Media Centre, which specialises in the research and development of digital technologies.

Peter Finnegan, director of International Research and Relations at Dublin City Council, said Dublin’s involvement in ICING leans heavily on providing easy access to city administration for citizens and businesses.

“We want to make this city the most accessible it can be to the ‘silent majority’ whose voices are often not heard in city decision-making,” he said.

Dublin’s plans centre heavily around the mobile phone as an access device. It’s believed this offers greater access to a wider range of citizens — most own mobiles but far fewer own PCs. Barcelona has taken a similar approach.

The ICING project team in Dublin is working on allowing mobile phones to interact with the legacy computer systems used in city administration, Finnegan said.

“If you come across something on the street that you feel needs to be fixed, you can take a photograph of it or text in to Dublin City Council, so we can put that into our audit as a job that needs to be done,” he said.

In the future, citizens will be able to choose from a menu of online services through various devices.

The seven-year programme aims to make all public buildings, public spaces and all streetscapes fully accessible to anybody of any ability.

For now, redevelopment plans for Dublin.ie include adding a mapping system for citizens to tie location data with information such as opening hours of nearby businesses.

Finnegan said DCC also plans to hold webcasts of city council meetings – a move doubtless prompted by San José, which has pioneered development in this area. “There will be a democratic element to the website, where it would offer a space for debate,” he said.

Extending democracy to citizens was a recurring theme of the event. Stephen O’Brien, e-government project manager with Liverpool City Council, said putting in place self-service websites for the public to deal with the council was vital. “The key to being a knowledge city is for citizens to do as much as possible themselves,” he said.

Microsoft’s technical evangelist, Jon Udell brought a US perspective to the discussion and expanded on this concept by showing how new web technologies are turning citizens into more active participants in civic life.

Applications built on open standards allow people to ‘mash up’ or combine different pieces of software to create something new, he said.

This could involve bringing together mapping information with statistical data, or photos and a discussion board, as happened in a New Hampshire litter clean-up campaign.

“What’s happening is citizens are becoming contributors of all sorts of information in the community,” said Udell, “We’re at a point now where that can happen in a relatively organic way. We can start to see citizens on the ground becoming the eyes and ears of the community in some really important sense.”

This kind of citizen democracy is “ad hoc but effective”. The reason it has not happened on a wider scale is that more people aren’t aware of what’s available to them, said Udell.

Helsinki is working on a similar concept. The city’s website includes a map and users have the ability to comment on the information. Discussion forums that exist elsewhere have also been added to the site, said Iina Oilinki, ICING project co-ordinator,

Technology is only one part of creating a knowledge city and Professor John Ratcliffe, head of the DIT Futures Academy, said several challenges face cities in the 21st century – too many people, not enough resources and the time involved to make changes.

Controversially, he said the Government’s National Spatial Strategy fails to take into account Dublin’s place as the economic – if not necessarily cultural – hub of the country. “It will be a disaster for the Irish economy if we don’t make the Dublin region our priority for growth and development,” he said.

Other obstacles may block the vision outlined at the start. Much of what is suggested relies on easy access to wireless networks. Earlier this year, Dublin City Council backed down from a proposal to roll out this technology in the city, fearing competition from commercial providers would draw ire from EU quarters. Other cities including Derry, Tallinn and Liverpool have managed to surmount this roadblock, but Finnegan pointed out that in those cases it was either for a pilot site or there was no competing infrastructure already in place.

Do you know the electronic way to San José?

As one of the largest US cities and home to Silicon Valley, San José can lay greater claim than most to being a knowledge city.

In the wake of the 2000-2003 recession, it decided to harness technology to enhance its competitiveness. “We have pushed as many of our processes on to the internet as we possibly can,” said Paul Krutko, the city’s chief development officer.

“That means delivering planning documents, drawings and all the material necessary to document projects. We do that for all city procurement as well as managing utility accounts,” he said.

The city also implemented a new IT system for it to interact with businesses – modelled on the auction website eBay – to overcome what had been a very bureaucratic process.

In addition, all San José city council meetings are archived online. Under the city’s open-government structure, documents to be discussed at the meetings are posted online two weeks in advance.

“That may sound cumbersome but we believe it’s critical to building community support for policy change. Because citizens have access to the documents, they’re making the argument for policy change ahead of the political leadership,” Krutko said.

He urged politicians to look past their hesitation about making data available to the public. “I’d argue that the access to the information makes policy change faster. Transparency builds trust and builds connection,” he said.

© Silicon Republic Ltd 2007

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- Gordon Smith