Toolkit for Smart City Contribution
The idea of a smart city is becoming more prolific and understood as more cities worldwide. Many are beginning to develop plans towards innovative and useful advances to establish systems to give their citizens better quality of life.
As the need of technological equipment is required for many of these plans, the skills on how to effectively and efficiently use it is also required. The average citizen within a new smart city has to a need to understand how their habitat is being designed around them. This may not also be of a benefit to citizen who may not have an understanding of the technology or the knowledge on how to use it. Corporate involvement may also lead to a more limited understanding by citizens. Corporations although may bring in the underlying technology and design of smart city infrastructure but may also have their own goals which can possibly be outside of the needs of the already established community.
If a smart city is to be effective, transparent and available to all citizens regardless of understanding and knowledge behind the technology. By giving citizens a roll in the data being collected that can be used to improve the city you giving license for collaboration.
The Smart Citizen Kit as these ideas in mind that can empower the average citizen to have an input within the development of the city. The kit allows its users to collect a range of environmental data around their location.
The kit was introduced on Kickstarter to look for funding initially and is now available to regular purchase. Keeping inline with the idea of community input, the project (hardware and software) is completely open-source. This offers users and people interested in the project to help advance the system wherever possible.
This device looks as much to crowd sourcing in the data it collects as much as it did in it’s initial funding. By using a Smart Citizen Kit, user can feel that their input can make difference by the data they collect and upload to an online database which anyone can access. Furthermore given the environmental conditions the Smart Citizen Kit monitors, the data can be used on a day to day basis by the user encouraging them to identify insights.
