Notes from Meetup #1
On Friday the 28th October 2016, we held the first of our revamped SmartSheffield meetups, very kindly supported by Arup in their gorgeous cafe, breakout, kitchen and presentation space at the top of the 3 St Paul’s building - it’s a perfect space for a meetup, and the pizza from Piccolino’s and drinks were top notch as well. Thanks so much to Matt Proctor, and everyone at Arup!
Below are my notes on the main topics that were discussed in the ‘open space’ sessions, but before I launch into that, I’ve got a couple of housekeeping things to talk about first.
We originally decided on the ‘last Friday of the month’ slot because we envisaged the event mainly as an after-work social, and that slot didn’t clash with any of the other major tech meetups in the city. However, as we found out on Friday, it’s not ideal for the kind of event SmartSheffield now is - a lot of people couldn’t make it because it was a Friday evening, especially during half-term. So we’re going to review this in the next week or so, and work out a new regular time of the month.
Also, we’re going to keep tweaking the format as we go forward, especially around how we introduce everyone to each other and how we run the open space session before the food arrives. I’ll post some ideas around this in due course.
Meanwhile, never mind the Minestrone, let’s get to the main course of this post…
Rachel Macrorie & Aidan While
The Sheffield Urban Institute
Rachel Macrorie and Aidan While from the new Urban Institute at Sheffield University introduced us to their organisation, and the research topics that interest them.
The Urban Institute is an international research centre at the University of Sheffield that examines how cities are responding to intensified urbanisation, technological innovation and resource constraint. With critical social science expertise, they bring together the multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge needed to support sustainable urban change in the UK and abroad.
They develop conceptual and applied insights and promote debate through their research. They engage with policy-makers, businesses, practitioners and community groups.
The institute has five core research interests, in which they actively look for research collaborations:
Urban Automation: Understanding how non-human decision-making shapes the organisation and control of cities.
Co-producing Urbanisms: Working innovatively with city partners to develop and appraise inclusive forms of urban governance.
Controlled Environments: Investigating the potential of artificial environments to support urban life in a changing global climate.
Infrastructure in Action: Analysing how urban infrastructures influence resource flows and shape urban development.
Urban Humans: Examining what is distinctive about ‘urban humans’ in a rapidly urbanising world.
Rachel and Aidan also took us through a number of research networks and projects they are already engaged with, spanning topics from low carbon to smart grids and smart urbanism case study projects.
You can see their slides with all this information here: https://sheffield.digital/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/SmartSheffield-Urban-Institute.compressed.pdf
Furthermore the Institute is hosting their launch event “Imagining and Transforming Cities” on the 9th November -info and registration are here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/imagining-and-transforming-cities-tickets-27323978756
This institute are on Twitter at @Urban_inst, and you you find out more about them at their website.
SmartSheffield News
LoRaWan
I’ve had a few conversations over the last six months around the idea of setting up a Sheffield LoRaWAN, or Long Range Wide Area Network. This is a low cost, low bandwidth but long range wireless communications protocol, which means you can cover a city with just a few nodes, and little cost, but even though it doesn’t allow the transfer for large amounts of data, it’s good enough for small sporadic data packages, like slow-sampling sensor outputs.
Many other parts of the world have set up such a network - Amsterdam even crowd-sourced one in 6 days, apparently - and there are several sources of good information on this topic online. The most interesting, perhaps, is The Things Network, which is an open global community platform for people who are developing LoRaWAN networks.
One caveat that was expressed in the meetup was that LoRaWAN uses unlicensed spectrum, so may not be very future-proof in the UK, and the suggestion was made that a network using TV White-Noise spectrum might be a better long term solution.
But nonetheless, given that several firms have expressed an interest in helping out and/or hosting a gateway (Arup, Mobile Power and ObjectForm have all suggested to me that they’d be up for it), it really just needs someone to take on the project, investigate properly and organise it. And we’ll help where we can!
So this is an open call to anyone interested in getting this off the ground, and anyone interested in applications that could run on the network.
Get in touch with me at info@smartsheffield.rocks or via Twitter.
Sheffield Tree Map
As I’m sure everyone knows, the tree-felling part of Sheffield City Council’s Streets Ahead private finance initiative with Amey has been the nexus of much friction in the city over the last 12 months or so, and should hold some interest for us from a smart city perspective.
First of all, Chris Rust has set up an online map showing the trees that have been marked for felling, replacement or planting, using an initial data set scraped from public Streets Ahead reports by James Jefferies.
You can find it at https://sheffieldtreemap.wordpress.com
This is a really good example of citizen-driven data mapping, and it sparked an interesting conversation about how citizens can aggregate information and gain a broader understanding of an issue using freely available data and online tools. It even raises the possibility that private individuals with the right sets of skills can create better maps than the institutions responsible for the things that are being mapped. And furthermore hints at deeper implications of how knowledge is acquired and mediated in a digitally connected society: given that individuals can inform themselves very rapidly in their own time, and share this knowledge in groups, they can become expert in a topic much faster than the attitudes of others might allow for. In other words, you can meet someone one day and, through conversation, reach the conclusion that that person knows little about a subject, and then meet them again three months later, by which time they have become far more knowledgeable than you might naturally expect them to have been able to. Thus external attitudes towards campaign groups (or any group) may not develop as quickly as the expertise the campaign group is itself able to develop.
These concepts were expressed to me several times during the SmartSheffield work, and I recorded suggestions for how city authorities might adapt to them in the Themes section of the report: the Inclusion theme, especially, covered fairness, digital inclusion, citizen engagement, smarter civic dialogue, engagement platforms, creativity and play, visibility and citizen-led design - all aspects that would serve to improve such situations.
Furthermore under Leadership, I highlighted ‘harnessing movements’ specifically. Here’s what I said:
With so much of the population now networked together, and talking to each other about things that affect them in their environment (both the good and the bad), the ability to listen to people’s concerns; recognise where there are motivated groups; provide insight, information and tools to enable them; and connect them with other city actors who can help them make a positive difference, are crucial leadership skills that should be fostered.
During the meetup we also noted that a similar situation to the tree felling 'issue’ (and the Rare and Racy conflict before it), is currently brewing over the recent flood alleviation plan consultation. See for example this article in the Sheffield Star:
I understand of course that resistance is often politically motivated, and that some conflicting positions are intractable. But healthy civic discourse is crucial to the health of a city, and (still!) desperately needs to be re-thought for the digitally connected city.
This is a topic that will come up repeatedly, I’m sure.
Travel Spirit
This is an initiative that was born out of the innovation team at Transport for Greater Manchester. Travel Spirit is a platform for open source mobility-as-a-service data and software. The instigator is Simon Ho from TfGM, and I spoke to the new CTO Jeremy Dalton from Method City last week about it and he sent me a short overview:
“TravelSpirit is a Community Interest Company (CIC), founded to serve a global community of software developers, transport operators, digital businesses, planners, activists and policy-makers with a common interest in a future of mobility that is inclusive, integrated and sustainable. In particular, we are working to promote Mobility as a Service (MaaS) systems, support open source software development, and help our partners and clients develop and implement innovative solutions to mobility and transport challenges. One of the ways we are working to achieve these ends is by creating resources for collaborative projects, including an open source software commons and open source licensing and development support through a public fiduciary entity. We also work with local stakeholders and members of the TravelSpirit community to push forward new initiatives and pilot projects related to smart mobility and transport.”
So if anyone is interested in mobility-as-a-service applications, they are well worth engaging with. There is a Travel Spirit UK projects board that is tasked with getting pilots and projects running.
Hopefully we’ll get Jeremy, or one of the other principles, over here to a meetup so they can tell us more about it in the near future.
Grey to Green
The first phase of Sheffield’s “Grey to Green” scheme has just been completed and won two awards at the Sheffield Design Awards last week (best new open space, and most outstanding project).
Grey to Green is part of the Riverside business district 'greening’ regeneration, and is the UK’s largest retrofit Sustainable Drainage System (SuDS) scheme. It’s a collaboration between Sheffield City Council and the University of Sheffield’s Department of Landscape. Great to see advanced horticulture used in civil engineering projects.
More info is here: https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/regeneration/grey-to-green.html
Food Hall
Another Sheffield Design Award winner was Food Hall, which is a “communal dining facility and Freecycle food network run by students, grads and young people trailing out new ways of engaging with each other and the wider community through shared food.” They have a cafe on Eyre Street and are an accredited member of the Real Junk Food Network.
They also express a strong community ethos and commitment to action research in their work:
“As students, graduates, architectural designers, town planners, writers, theorists, web developers,cooks, kitchen fitters, citizens and city dwellers our actions can be defined as ‘public space and resource making in a difficult neoliberal economy’ in the right to the city movement. We firstly research issues close to home then immediately act on constructing a solution. High concept, concise and direct implementation. We are not funded by any funding body and are entirely not for profit, we have no client other than the city itself.”
In addition, FoodHall has been developing a web app, with which local users can invite each other for communal meals. The beta version of the app is currently only available to University of Sheffield students, but last time I spoke to them (which was a while ago, admittedly) they said would welcome help with it - so if anyone involved in UX and/or app development reads this and wants to do something really worthwhile in their spare time - please get in touch with them directly, or let me know via email or twitter and I’ll put you in touch with the FoodHall organisers!
Meanwhile check out their website and they are also on Twitter. And visit their cafe, it’s open every Thursday, Friday and Saturday between 10am and 3pm.
Sheffield Digital Business Incubator
Back in the summer, Sheffield City Council put the provision of a Sheffield Digital Business Incubator (also knows as the ‘Maker Hub’) out to tender, and the decision on this is due before the end of the first week in November.
Background on the project is here: http://sheffielddemocracy.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?AIId=12105
Sheffield City Council has been requested by the Department of Culture, Media Sport to receive and then act as Accountable Body for £3.5m capital funding to establish a new facility providing work space, business incubation and other services for entrepreneurs and small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) based in the Sheffield City Region whose ambitions and business models rely on digital technologies and their applications.
This is going to be an important asset for the digital development of the city, and one we’ll be discussing regularly I’m sure.
Sheffield Public WiFi
We are aware that there’s a public procurement for city centre wifi in progress, but as far as I know, the request to tender hasn’t been issued by Sheffield City Council yet. I’ve asked the people responsible for the procurement for an update and hopefully I’ll be able to share it at the next meetup.
Matt Proctor next to the 360° time lapse camera on the roof of 3 St Paul’s Place - the camera is documenting the New Retail Quarter development that is set to transform Sheffield city centre over the next few years.
Right, that’s it I think - If anyone has anything to add, please let me know! And also if anyone wants to write about anything and post it to this blog, let me know too.
It was a great event - as informative as it was fun & social - and I’m really looking forward to the next one. See you there hopefully!
Chris Dymond, Unfolding
