Notes from Meetup #8: It’s not about the Tech!
Well this has taken quite a while to write up!
Partly it’s taken this long because life kept getting in the way, and partly because we had all kinds of trouble getting the videos down from Matt’s iCloud in one piece. A couple of the files were too big, and apparently corrupted in several places - in the end we had to set up another camera in front of my monitor, record the videos streaming to it, and then re-edit the new video to remove all the pauses and glitches.
This took some time.
As a result, Nigel Slack’s and RIck Robinson’s talks are pretty poor quality - they haven’t been completely lost though! Steve Turner’s, Kurtis Wright’s and Matt’s SmartSheffield News are at the usual level of smart phone fidelity, luckily.
All this has held up the write ups of the other events we’ve held since February as well - but now the video issue is resolved and things are calming down a little bit for Summer, these should follow very soon as well.
Anyway, back to the programme.
The February event took place on Monday the 12th February, and was themed “It’s Not About the Tech!” with talks that attempt to show the wider rationales, impacts and considerations of introducing urban technologies. The evening kicked off with…
Nigel Slack
Being an Active Citizen
Nigel Slack is a self-described Active Citizen, which he characterises as “a campaigner, an advocate, someone who challenges the status quo - someone working to make the city a better place”. In this talk he explains the different aspects to his practice, and the ways in which he tries to make public decision-making more transparent and accessible to the general public.
Nigel talks about his work with other local and regional civil society organisations such as Sheffield for Democracy, the Electoral Reform Society at the University of Sheffield and Sheffield City Partnership, engagement with Citizens Assemblies, and the concept of Administrative Evil which was his topic at the recent Festival of Debate.
He also presents the “Talking Sheffield” show on Sheffield Live, the city’s community TV and media platform, and runs a blog called The Public Interest, where he posts regularly about issues affecting the citizens of Sheffield.
On the subject of digital technology, Nigel says that one of his major concerns is centred around the idea that it “promotes a perfect way of doing things. That you’re not doing it right. Yet. Unless you’ve got the piece of tech that shows you how to do it”, and that it has a tendency to feed our individual neuroses.
He also discusses the two areas in which change in cities is most needed: infrastructure and governance, and how he engages with those agendas to affect change.
Nigel relies on donations from citizens to fund his work, which represents an interesting paradigm in the way citizens engage in local affairs, in parallel to the local press and other sources of information.
In the 2015 SmartSheffield report, under the Leadership theme, we wrote about the need to ‘Harness Movements’. We 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.”
Active citizens like Nigel may be able to provide the critical insight that enables this to happen in ways that are effective.
Rick Robinson from Arup
Urban Challenges and Opportunities
Rick is Digital Property and Cities Leader at Arup, and here provides an overview of the most significant challenges facing cities across the world, including low productivity, an ageing population, the squeeze on local authority budgets, worsening health outcomes, and food sustainability.
Rick’s practice focuses on the “creation of positive outcomes through the intersection of individual behaviour, place and technology”, and he looks at the problems caused by previous generations of technology (e.g. the automobile and concrete) and urban policy (e.g. national transport infrastructure to connect the UK’s city centres) and the negative effects this had on land value, livability and deprivation (see Lichfield, 2015, and UCL, 2014).
How can we avoid such consequences in the next generation of technological change? Rick points to one overarching challenge, and three huge opportunities:
The huge challenge is displacement. Nobody yet know how disruptive the change is going to be over the next 50 years, as at least half the tasks that are currently performed by humans are performed by machine. Will our societies be able to adapt sufficiently to perform the higher level tasks that will escape automation? Will a majority be unable to find work and reliant on benefits or a universal basic income? Will the vast majority of the world’s wealth be concentrated among a few global platforms? These are the questions that really define our time.
There are also significant opportunities, though:
We’ve never before had so much data so readily available to make use of, to predict, to analyse to innovate with and convert into value, and it’s never been easier or cheaper to start a new business and be productive.
So the three opportunities are that digital technology is able to provide (open) data, (open) innovation and (individual) empowerment.
Not all models are equally beneficial though. For instance the platform businesses that have scaled up rapidly in recent years have produced inequalities, whereby those providing labour (e.g. Deliveroo riders) are relatively disadvantaged, while those providing assets (e.g. AirBnB hosts) are relatively advantaged - in other worlds the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer (see McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2014 and JP Morgan Chase, 2016).
The key will be to find and promote arrangements that provide new efficiencies but also have predominantly positive externalities.
And there are huge opportunities to apply technology to make work an order of magnitude more efficient than it is currently.
Steve Turner from Arup
Bridging the Gap between City Challenges and Digital Solutions
Steve Turner is Digital Cities Lead at Arup, and here he dissects the gap between the realities of municipal leadership and local authority service provision, and the potential that digital technology presents. In 2017 Arup published a Global Review of Smart Cities, in which they showed the key purposes for which cities employ digital technology are to improve outcomes and efficiencies; to accelerate economic growth and to increase citizen engagement.
In practice, though, there is generally a yawning gap between the challenges that local authorities, and service users face and the technology and design firms who could develop suitable solutions to these issues.
There are lots of solutions looking for problems, and lots of vendors trying to sell things, but local authorities often don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to appreciate what is available in the marketplace, let alone assess a broad set of solutions. Even in the flagship Smart Cities, there is frequently no great legacy after the public money runs out.
There are examples of good applications of urban technology, such as Christchurch’s Digital Masterplanning, the DOLL Living Lab in Denmark, air quality improvements in Lille, savings from digital transformation in Camden, and elsewhere.
But the gulf between problem and solution still remains in most places.
Arup’s approach to this problem is to develop innovation engagement initiatives, in which they work with city leaders to understand the local challenges starting with the city strategy or city plan. They then unpick the key challenges by interviewing service managers and users, and engage with the tech sector to scope out those challenges. Often this process identifies 20 or 30 challenges initially, and then reduces these down to just three or four.
These challenges then feed a programme whereby tech SMEs are shortlisted and then work alongside the local authority for roughly six months to prototype and trial solutions, before, hopefully, scaling up. This gives the local authority and tech firms the opportunity to work together and come to understand the opportunities.
Kurtis Wright from LociPay
On Open Banking
Kurtis spoke to us roughly a year ago about his project to create a local digital currency called My Sheffield Pound, and he now returns to explain how this concept has evolved into a new fintech startup called LociPay, which is taking advantage of a profound shift in the European regulatory landscape for banking.
A new law - the PSD2 (Payment Service Directive 2) - came into force in January this year, which amongst other things requires the 9 main UK banks to publish open APIs so that 3rd parties can access bank accounts and services.
2 kinds of new services will make use of these new capabilities:
Account Information Service Providers (AISPs), that poll, aggregate and visualise financial information.
Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISPs), which essentially act as a new merchant gateway with direct access to the customer’s bank account, and don’t need to go via Visa or Mastercard or any other interface.
This is the route that Loci Pay is taking, in order to provide a new mobile payment mechanism for local transactions, independent retailers and SMEs, and provide them with a far cheaper transaction costs. In addition, it acts as a bank account to consumers which has no fees, via a partner challenger bank.
Kurtis believes that by providing a niche payment service, consumer can also use the brand awareness to know they are making locally economically supportive purchasing decisions, no matter where they are in the country. I.e. if the venue accepts LociPay, you can be sure that their revenue is not being routed offshore.
And then in future his plan is to encourage positive budgeting and savings behaviour via additional AISP services.
Matt Proctor from Arup
SmartSheffield News
Matt took over news duties this month, and covered the following:
SCR Digital Action Plan (still not publically released)
Urban Flows Observatory - new sensor van
Things Network Sheffield - new gateways with WANdisco
Sheffield Box - welcomes new arrivals to Sheffield
