API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

Smart Cities around the globe are levering IoT to make their cities run in a smoother, usable and environmentally friendly manner while budgets are getting tighter. While public sector IoT is creating business opportunities it has been noted that often these investments are resulting in siloed, closed solutions. Helsinki, like many other cities, has been active on open data, open APIs and engagement of third parties (businesses, developers) on digital service production. Cities in initiatives like Open and Agile Smart Cities and projects like Synchronicity and Select4Cities have now started moving forward with taking the lessons learnt following the same principles of openness in the IoT domain: engaging businesses and citizens through out the data value chain, enabling crowdsourcing of data, building IoT capabilities through hacklab functions, harmonizing southbound and northbound APIs and building an open source IoT platform in collaboration with other cities. To mention a few.