LOTI: IoT Week[note 32]
LOTI began 2020 with a list of 23 items to be delivered before our one year anniversary. On that list was a plan to establish a year-long London Smart Street Infrastructure Working Group. However, this didn’t seem to fit in with LOTI’s current pace and ways of working.
IoT Week was planned over the space of just over three weeks as an experiment to compress the length of time needed to deliver our desired outputs to a week, bringing together different actors from public and private sectors to explore this question: “How can boroughs use IoT-enabled smart street infrastructure for the benefit of all Londoners?”
Monday
We kicked off LOTI and the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) Sharing Cities’ ‘IoT Week’ with a keynote from Theo Blackwell, London’s Chief Digital Officer. He shared his thoughts on London’s most pressing challenges, which included a focus on the climate crisis as a key driver for considering the potential of new technologies. He also explained that the latest iteration of the London Datastore will explore the addition of sensor data to add a level of assurance and richer depth to London’s data. He concluded with an emphasis on public engagement, with a cautionary line explaining that “The worst thing we can do is carry on without talking to people thinking it is too difficult.”
Afterwards, we heard from our panels of experts. Panel 1 was chaired by Nathan Pierce, Head of the Smart London Team at GLA and featured Jemma Hoare, Sharing Cities Community Engagement Officer at Greenwich Council, Graham Colclough, Partner at UrbanDNA, Steve Turner, Digital Cities Lead at Arup, and Phil Saw, Project Director at the Infrastructure and Projects Authority. They discussed how boroughs could make informed decisions about which Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can help deliver their desired outcomes. They set out the disadvantages of boroughs running multiple pilots, and advised that in order for them to be able to commission with confidence in future, they would need to consider long scale adoption of that teaches transferability and not individuality. That means collaborating on standards for London and sharing infrastructure roadmaps with one another. The panel concluded with a list of skills that London boroughs would need to recruit to power the future of service delivery, and this included: Service designers, user researchers, project delivery officers who had an understanding of the new technologies and an ability to listen to Londoners’ needs, as well as system thinkers.
Panel 2 was chaired by Eddie Copeland, Director of LOTI and featured Trevor Dorling, Director of Digital Greenwich, Miranda Sharp, Director of Innovation at Ordnance Survey, Paul Hodgson, Senior Manager for City Data at GLA, and Neil Hoose, visiting Professor at the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London. They considered how boroughs can ensure IoT data delivers real insights that benefit the whole of London. The panel concurred that poor quality data was a real problem that could negatively impact on our ability to predict, respond or deliver real insights from this technology’s data.
We concluded with Panel 3, which was chaired by Eddie Copeland, Director of LOTI discussing how boroughs might deploy IoT technology in a way that engenders citizens’ trust. This panel featured Tom Symons, Head of Government Innovation Research at Nesta, Lauren Sager Weinstein, Chief Data Officer at Transport for London, Gavin Summerson, City Standards Lead at Connected Places Catapult, and Olivier Thereaux, Head of Technology at ODI. The concept of data ownership can be complex to understand, but the panel reiterated how important it is for London boroughs to effectively engage with the public. The panel concluded that engagement goes beyond basic communication and requires boroughs to create decision making structures where the community affected by the decisions are involved.
The live-streams of all three panels are available online (please see Part 1 and Part 2 here), and the full agenda for Day 1 is available here.
We spent the afternoon reviewing our crowdsourced list of questions to identify what is missing and then turned those questions into “How Might We…?” statements under four distinct headings: strategy, business case, data insights and public trust.
Under strategy, we concluded that it would worth spending IoT Week looking at how we might:
- Develop an IoT Service Standard for London
- Create a collaborative approach to IoT in London
- Map what’s going on in London
- Develop a vision for the use of IoT in London
Under business case, we concluded that this should also include ‘use cases’, and we should explore how we might:
- Develop and maintain a catalogue of use cases and user stories (what has worked or failed)
- Develop a reusable set of business case templates
- Develop a single business case for London
Under data insights, we thought it would be best spending the week thinking about how we might:
- Share / join up IoT data amongst boroughs (and between teams within one borough)
- Share data between residents, the private sector, and other public sectors.
- Better understand the value of IoT data
- Use data standards
- Understand and address the (cyber) security aspects of IoT
And lastly, under public trust, we concluded we’d spend the week considering how we might encourage boroughs to:
- Develop a robust approach to IoT ethics and governance (and understand similarities / differences to boroughs’ general use of data)
- Raise awareness and educate the public about IoT data collection and how it’s used
- Give citizens some form of control over the use of IoT in their communities
- Openly and honestly share lessons from breach incidents across boroughs
- Ensure providers of IoT tech have embedded citizens’ / boroughs’ values in the tech
Tuesday
Day 2 was the first day for our smaller research group of volunteers, made up of borough officers from a diverse range of service areas, academics, and representatives with different specialisms from private businesses. The day started off at City Hall with a brief recap of Day 1, followed by some alone-time spent familiarising ourselves with questions and contributions that had been crowdsourced into a knowledge base document (bit.ly/IoTwisdom) under the four headings at the end of Monday’s conference.
Volunteers were asked to spot if there was anything missing and draw together themes and trends where they existed. The full agenda for Day 2 is available here.
Then came the real ask. Volunteers were asked to create ideas for potential solutions to the questions posed. They could draw on resources already in use in other cities and countries, and from their own experiences, too. After an intense few hours of solo work, Day 2 concluded with each volunteer presenting their idea back to the whole group.
Wednesday
Having slept on the ideas overnight, Day 3 kicked off with a speed critique of all the ideas, and the morning ended with a digital vote to decide on which three of the projects would be taken forward. The full agenda is available here.
Embed: https://twitter.com/LOTI_LDN/status/1235141699967553536?s=20
Following a lunchtime migration from City Hall to London Councils’ offices, the volunteers were invited to work in groups to consider the problems, potential users and solutions, as well as think up how each of the three most popular ideas might practically work and be sustained.
Thursday
Volunteers hit the ground running on Day 4, working in groups to develop prototypes and sketch out the content of their public show and tells for Day 5. The full agenda for Day 4 is available here.
Friday
Following a recap of the week, Friday concluded with a final show and tell of the prototypes created by the three research groups.
Group 1 presented their prototype for a common approach for IoT in London. They worked on developing a Pan-London framework/guidance based on existing standards and guidance that would help boroughs to design and procure IoT in future.
Group 2 presented their prototype for a Collaborative London IoT Portal, with an aim to dispel boroughs’ fear of starting IoT projects, break down silos that act as a barrier to collaboration and could cause some to repeat unsuccessful pilots being deployed elsewhere, and foster a culture of shared learning.
The show and tells concluded with Group 3’s presentation on developing an IoT Awareness Campaign that explains IoT in a way that everyone can understand. Inspired by Wellington’s resilience strategy, they sought to their prototype sought to address the knowledge and awareness gap in local government and the general public, as well as clearly and concisely communicate how IoT benefits the public through a medium and in language that is accessible with the desired result of building public trust.
Catherine Weller summed it up best in her tweet: ‘We don’t have to do things alone. We can do them together…[and] seize the opportunities of scale.’
IoT Week was an experiment to see how LOTI might facilitate collaboration between officers from London boroughs, IoT experts from the private sector, as well as academics to develop practical solutions to how borough might make technology embedded in street infrastructure work better for Londoners. We were astonished and so pleased to have secured the level of engagement that we did from our expert volunteers throughout the week, and ended up with three impressive prototypes as a result of their contributions.
This week, we’ll be considering how we might develop these further, as well as summarise the knowledge base document (bit.ly/IoTwisdom) which you have all been contributing resources and information to.
We hope that you can all remain engaged on this agenda as in our view, this is only the beginning. The full IoT photo album is now available online. We have also created a shared team space online to continue the conversation and would love it if you could join us there by visiting: https://3.basecamp.com/4232067/join/B6nZqFWxbF8U.
Group 1: Christy Mitchell (World Economic Forum), Nana Manitara (Methods Digital), Arjun Puri (SCC), Paul McDonald (Westminster and RBKC), Nathan Pierce (GLA), Genta Hajri (LOTI), Alex Gluhak (Digital Catapult), Julie Alexander (Places for People), Rebecca Mackenzie (Microsoft)
Group 2: Adam Chaffey (Liveable Cities), Csaba Kiraly (Digital Catapult), Mark Jenkinson (Crystal Associates), Perry Hazell (Southwark Council), Pierre Venter (Sutton and Kingston Councils), Ron Oren (Connected Places Catapult).
Group 3: Sandy Tung (GLA), Onyeka Onyekwelu (LOTI), Adam Collis (Third Street Group), David Reilly (Let’s Get Digital), Manjula Pindoria (London Borough of Brent), David Pickard (Kingston University), Uchenna D. Ani (UCL), Shade Nathaniel-Ayodele (London Borough of Southwark), Katie Hodges (City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea), Lauren Salisbury (London Borough of Brent), Sajed Amirinia (London Borough of Tower Hamlets).
This Week
As well as condensing the outputs of IoT Week, we’ll be:
- Meeting with GLA’s Economic Development team and Nitrous to discuss next steps for the development of the next phase of City Tools.
- Holding our first lunch meeting with LOTI’s network of Digital Apprentices.
- Following up on key actions for our data collaboration projects.
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