P

ublic engagement is the key to the success of building smart cities, technology experts said on the first day of the New Cities Summit 2015 in Jakarta.

Speaking at a panel discussion called '€œDelivering the Promise of Technology'€, Charbel Aoun, the president of Smart Cities at the Schneider Electric Ltd., emphasized that people-oriented technology was the most important part of building a smart city.

'€œCities are used to reactively put forward a solution to their problems. Today, people want to propose a solution to their problems to the city,'€ Aoun said on Tuesday at Ciputra Artpreneur in South Jakarta.

He continued, saying: '€œToday, 90 percent of cities use media [such as] newspapers, TV and radio as media to put out news. But today'€™s generation will Google what they want [to know], read the first page of Google and take action [...].

'€œTechnology is important but it is about what you want; what is it that you want to do.'€

Aoun also emphasized the advantage of engaging the public by making data available for them to use. He shared his experience while carrying out a pilot project with tech giant Microsoft in Barcelona, Spain, recently.

'€œWhat we did was, we put data into the hands of the community. Within three weeks, 60 young people came up with [mobile] applications that I and my team would have never thought about. That is because we only saw it from one side: the inside out [while the public] use the data for their livability and lifestyle,'€ he said.

Cho In-dong, the former director general of Seoul Innovation Department, shared his experience using public-oriented data as the basis of public policy making.

'€œ[South] Korea'€™s economy declined, so we needed to boost small and medium enterprises [SMEs]. We then analyzed anonymous credit card sales data to locate areas with more transactions. We also analyzed taxi calls [at night] to determine which areas we should provide with night buses operating after midnight until 5 a.m.'€

He said they later designed eight bus loops that operated at night in those areas to support the SMEs based on the analyses.

'€œThe citizens were quite happy with it and chose it as the number one city service project,'€ he added.

Speaking to The Jakarta Post after the panel discussion, Cho cited bottom-up policy-making as the key to success in public service.

'€œOnce the public'€™s engagement is successful, people will have an incentive to [continue]. If they get frustrated at first, they won'€™t be engaged at all. Let them feel their voices are heard. [The government'€™s] response [to the public'€™s ideas] is very important,'€ he said.

Jakarta Smart City unit head Setiaji said that the city administration had introduced mobile applications, such as Qlue, through which the Jakarta residents could convey their aspirations.

'€œThere were also other apps [developed by private developers]. We gathered ideas on our website and we accommodated them all,'€ he said, referring to smart-city.jakarta.go.id, a website which uses the Google Maps engine and data from smartphone traffic application Waze.

To accommodate residents who have not had access to technology, Setiaji continued, the city administration gathered ideas through traditional forums like Rembug RW (community unit forum).

When asked about inefficient smart city applications, Aoun said that problems could occur during a transition phase from manual to technology-based systems.

'€œ[The city] has to have the people define what they need. If it'€™s a solution that will involve people, they have to buy it,'€ he said. (prm)