Smart City – Lori Bush https://loribush.org Cary Town Council, At-Large Representative Mon, 23 Jul 2018 17:03:06 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 Our Smart City Journey https://loribush.org/2018/07/18/our-smart-city-journey/ https://loribush.org/2018/07/18/our-smart-city-journey/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2018 05:05:55 +0000 http://loribush.org/?p=1863 Cary has been in the news quite a bit lately about our Smart Cities initiatives.  It’s great to see how forward thinking our Town has been as we find new and exciting ways to cost-effectively deliver new services, streamline current capabilities, and improve our quality of life. I blogged about this last year – and at the time, we were at the beginning of our journey.  So, how far have we come?

Smart Cities Recap

Why do we want to be looking at “smart city” capabilities?

Because the opportunity of utilizing smart technologies and data analysis is that it allows us to optimize our town functions while also driving economic growth. And all of this is with the goal of improving the quality of life for our citizens.

Last year, Cary took on this idea full steam, creating a simulated Smart City Campus, partnering with vendors, local universities, our Town volunteer boards and smart city organizations to help us as we moved forward.  Throughout all of these efforts, Cary garnered a few awards:

What’s New and What’s Next? 

Recently,  I had the pleasure of presenting how Cary envisions utilizing technology for Public Good at Interop with our amazing CIO, Nicole Raimundo, have I mentioned she was NC Public Sector CIO of the Year?  Just sayin.

We had the opportunity to brag a bit about Cary, as well as share our vision and journey – from our two different perspectives – of an elected and a CIO.  It was great to hear from other CIOs and  public servants about their own process, and allowed us all to learn from each other.

We had a little video – to kick things off, and get people thinking.  What are some of the technologies that are in use, or could be in use, to help us in our daily lives?  What would that “Day in the Life” look like?  

  • COOL TECHNOLOGY IN USE
  • I’ve talked about some of the great innovations in use at the Town, or being piloted.   WAZE is already being used by many folks, and our Alexa app is in its 2nd Beta.  (I hope it will be launched soon!)
  • But one of the most exciting capabilities and one that gained a ton of interest from our Interop audience is a simple texting application.
  • It’s called TXT311.  And if you watched the above video, you might have seen a bit about it.
  • So, here’s the scenario:
  • It’s Saturday, and you pack up the dog and the kids and head out to one of our great dog parks with a plan to wear out the dog, and the kids. Beautiful day – perfect weather, ready for fun.

    Sad dog eyes…

  • And, you get to the gate at the Dog Park – and it’s stuck.  Your card won’t work. The gate won’t open.  No one is around, and it’s a Saturday.
  • I mean, c’mon. Look at these eyes —- how do you say “no” to that?
  • Who do you call?  (No, not Ghost Busters.)

Well, you don’t have to CALL anyone.

Hanging near the gate is this sign – directing you to use  TXT311, to let Town of Cary staff know about an issue.

TXT311 at Jack Smith Dog Park

 

Texting with the Town

So, you send out the text, and voila!  You get a response, and Luke is on the other end, responding to your request.

(This is the text from a live feed, but I removed the phone number of the caller.)

On the town side, we’re able to do something quick, and responsive, using a device that most people have with them.  In fact, studies have shown that texting is the #1 preferred method for support calls, it’s also the most used data service in the world. (Nielsen) and 89% of consumers want to use messaging to communicate with businesses. (Twilio)

Our use of TXT311 as a tool for citizen communication, combined with our back end systems and people, allows us to be quicker to respond, all while making it easier for our citizens to get to the right person that can address the problem.
  • WHY TXT311?
  • So, why is it called TXT311? Well, it’s kinda brilliant.  It’s a texting service (also called SMS which is short for Short Message Service.)  With SMS, you can send a message of up to 160 characters to another device. (In case you didn’t know, that’s why originally Twitter was limiting messages to 160 characters, so that folks that used SMS could leverage the service.)   
  • Anyway, the first part is TXT – meaning text.

The 2nd part is 311.  What’s 311?  3-1-1 is a numeric code set aside in telephone systems for non-emergency connections for municipalities.  Just like 9-1-1 is set aside for emergencies and first responders, and 6-1-1 is set aside for Telecommunication systems – 3-1-1 is set aside for cities.  It’s also become the term now used for all city related non-emergency call systems and centers.  Think of it like a hotline to your town, and you don’t have to remember the 919-460-xxxx number.

The first 311 system was launched in 1996, and since then the term has been used to refer to a number of connections between citizens and their local governments.  It’s also helped to drive more process improvements inside of government, because the focus continues to be on the citizen – and silos make it harder to respond quickly and efficiently.  So, now you get it!  TXT311 – it’s Cary’s first real use of the 311 term out in the wild, and it’s already helping our citizens.  

This is what Smart Cities is all about.  To leverage innovative ideas, technology and people – all coming together to make Cary the remarkable place it is to live, work, own a business, raise a family —- and to play.  At a dog park, if you want.

  • _________________________________
  • I’ll be talking about other technologies in upcoming blog posts – I hope you’ll stay tuned.And yes, that’s my dog, Luna.  (She’s an Irish Doodle and loves a good Dog Park.)

Oh, and if you want to watch Councilmember Jennifer Robinson and I talk about this a bit more, check out our Cary Matters video, below.

]]> https://loribush.org/2018/07/18/our-smart-city-journey/feed/ 2 Cary is a Smart City https://loribush.org/2017/07/10/cary-is-a-smart-city/ Mon, 10 Jul 2017 15:01:32 +0000 http://loribush.org/?p=1827 We’re in a Triangle of Smart Cities

I was honored to be asked to join Mayor Nancy McFarlane (Raleigh), Mayor Pam Hemminger (Chapel Hill) and City Manager Tom Bonfield (Durham) for a panel at the Triangle Smart Cities Summit last month.

A View from the City

The “View from the City” panel was moderated by Governor Martin O’Malley, and we bounced a number of questions, ideas,  and visions around the table regarding our take on “what IS a Smart City” and how we get there.  If you want, you can watch the WHOLE thing below.  What was apparent was that each of our municipalities is working hard to leverage technology to improve the lives of our residents – by tapping into the intellectual capital at our respective universities, engaging citizens and working across our city and town boundaries to find regional solutions and best practices.  I highlighted a number of our wins – like Aquastar, that I’ve blogged about before – and new things on the horizon.

Triangle Smart Cities

Speaking of New Things

The Town of Cary Technology Services group participated in the Triangle Smart Cities, by showcasing their new Innovation Experience Center as part of the “poster session.”  This new and exciting initiative is a way for Cary to test, develop and try out a number of technologies while creating public/private partnerships around Smart City capabilities.  All with the goal of addressing our business challenges, improving productivity, or saving money, or even to improve citizen engagement.

Cary Smart City Poster

This Center is in its early stages – with the vision to create a Smart City Town Campus, where some of these solutions can be piloted.

Here are just a few of the Use Cases:

  •  – Transportation and Smart Parking, providing parking info and availability info to staff and citizens through an app
  •  – Facility Usage, determining community center usage
  •  – Community Apps – finding ways to increase citizen engagement, utilalize data from other apps for overall usage info
  •  – Work order management – how to use the Internet of Things to help automate processes and drive data driven decisions
  •  – Alexa – Providing intelligent personal assistant capabilities, and government services on this new platform, check my blog about that, here.

Through their public/private partnerships, they will be able to try new capabilities around a number of technologies, from parking sensors to sensors on trash cans, to drones to test and inspect equipment, to smart lighting, and more.

(I’ll write more about each of these over the next few weeks.)

Sharing is Caring

Some of us techies have a difficult time explaining what we do and how we do it to non-techie folks.   So the folks at the Cary Technology Services  department thought they would find a way to try to do just that by having an Open House.   You know what you need for Open Houses, right?  Well, normally alchohol, but they didn’t have that,   (I know, right?)  But, they had the right stuff – cool stuff (drones, all kinds of neat devices), demonstrations (how to use Chatter, and how e911 works, demo of the trial parking app), interactive and engaging content (getting feedback from people on their use of tools, and an overview of Agile), and most importantly, dessert.  Oh, and shirts – they had cool T-Shirts for the team.  Wanna run through it?  Take a look.

While I was there, it was packed with people coming to learn more about what the TS Department does, how they do things, and how they can help.  I heard people with some “aha” moments during an Open Data demo while also trying to think how they might be able to use Tableau to solve some of their problems.  I saw folks learning how to use Chatter to keep abreast of things going on in Town, and lots of “wows” as I walked around.

We have Interns

There were some young folks there too, the Interns, guiding the employees around, and showing off what they were working on this summer.  It’s an amazing opportunity – to both see the inner workings of government, and to be able to work on a real project.  They were all so thrilled with what they are learning – and we learn so much from them. These are our citizens of the future – hopefully they will pursue jobs in the Public Sector – we need great and innovative people like them.

Town of Cary Interns

What’s next?

I’m so very proud of what our innovative teams have done – this new “Smart City Campus” is right here on our Town Hall Campus – near the Herb Young Center.  This will be a place where we can partner with a number of private companies to try new technologies and capabilities that will address current and new problems – all in a real world environment without interrupting our citizens lives.  Cary will be leveraging Internet of Things hardware and software – and we are leading the way – in fact, this is one of the first implementations of Cisco’s IOT Platform in the US, I believe.

Over the next few weeks I’ll highlight some of the great work these folks are doing – with a deep dive into some of the technologies and efforts to leverage data to improve our collective quality of life.

And yes, there will be a discussion of drones, I promise. 🙂

 

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