I sat on the Birmingham Smart City commission – my main two pennorth  was to try and providing thinking about community level activity and how plans and changes might relate to that.  I was also trying to encourage planning for simpler ways of achieving civic good.

Yesterday the commission made it’s roadmap/action plan public.  This isn’t a consultation document – it’s a list of things that the commission wants to get on with making happen.  They will either happen through existing initiatives or funding will be sought to get things going.

• You can though see the full list and comment on each one of them.
• If you think you’re doing something to contribute to Birmingham as a smart city you can share that here.

You can read read the full document that gives context.  pdf

It’s all been put together with a lot of effort from Digital Birmingham.

I have mixed feelings about Smart City as an idea, even a phrase. It feels too corporate and too much about large global businesses getting their teeth into how we run our cities.  It can though be much more than that – and I do believe that the growing flow of data about what we do in cities will shift power and change relationships between civic and commercial organisations.  So to help make that as human as we all want getting involved makes more sense than tutting from teh sidelines.