Ismael Dia, Senior Director for Government Accounts with GovDelivery Europe, and Chair of this session, introduced the topic of smart cities. “Smart cities” is a multi-faceted way of educating citizens by contributing to building infrastructures, shaping policy and promoting e-participation. The citizen is the main ingredient of smart cities. It changes the way we all live, move and think. It allows saving energy and raw materials, and is based on the economy of sharing ideas and thoughts about smart cities. The ideal smart city of tomorrow should move better with internet and social media. The lifestyle of citizens should be more connected to energy, and a new economy of service model should be developed in the near future.

The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is divided in five different parts, and classifies citizen’s primary needs. On one hand, the pyramid distinguishes physiological needs. On the other, safety needs appear to be important, followed by love needs and esteem. Lastly, self-actualization is the most important need.

According to Mr. Dia every resilient community should ask itself: “What kind of data is important to our organization?”

Samia Melhem, Lead ICT policy Specialist, Chair eDevelopment Group, Information and Communication Technologies Sector Unit at the World Bank Group, promotes technology for development by finding measures for cities to become smarter. Her main role is helping smart cities develop. Through finance and e-government, the main goal is develop health, education, safety and new services throughout and thanks to smart cities. Ms. Melhem’s biggest clients are in Africa where the “Smart Africa” initiative can be found in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa.

A smart city needs to be connected. Citizens need to be connected to the city, and finally, smart cities need to be connected to the smart government.

By 2050, there will be 9 billion people in the world. How can we scale up, and serve the population? The answer is to serve citizens with technology, making sure we live in a stable world. How to help local authorities? Collaboration with municipalities is a key element to help cities become smart.

Eric Legale, Managing Director of Issy Media in the city of Issy-les Moulineaux in France, defines what smart cities are. They are technical spirits according to companies. Smart cities are like forest societal projects, they are the future of tomorrow by helping with infrastructure, energy, transport, governance, social development, education, culture, citizen participation and security. Smart cities are the second wave of revolution after the digital one; they represent the technical vision of tomorrow. Open data is a wonderful opportunity for smart cities. It is also an opportunity to show the way we move in our cities. Thanks to applications such as “Transport Net” and “Citadel on the Move”, new solutions are being found to promote smart mobility. These projects find different ways to fight traffic jams in order to improve the quality of life of citizens.

The next case study came from Japan. Eikazu Niwano, Producer, R&D Planning Department at NTT Corporation, gave us the general background along with important solutions to optimize efficient management. SCOS (smart city operating system) is a citizen-oriented smart city operated system.

The key concepts of high-level function requirements include:

• Social trust management;
• Cross sectorial regional life service  and information integration management;
• E-self-governance management.

Platform operators such as SCOS aim to serve citizens’ self-governmental entities which then give back to these platforms.

In the internet world it is difficult to access service providers. An important requirement is to reach providers and services based on social trust. Another requirement is to address operations for governmental entities and health public support. The key concept revolves around a city environment that makes citizens rely on social trust.

The session than shifted its geographical focus moving to a case study from Canada presented by Mr. Doug Craig, Mayor of Cambridge. According to our speaker, building isn’t investing in materials; it is investing in people by building a community. His idea is to create an experience by transforming libraries most hiding values of communities. “We are not building luxury but a community” says Doug Craig.

Ms. Ching-Chin Liao, Deputy Secretary General of Taichung City Government in Taiwan, said that the city had to become friendlier for the aged people. In Taiwan, there are about 250 thousand aged people. Thanks to high tech, and specially smartphones, 60% of the population there uses smartphones. According to another survey that Ms. Liao cited, 72.5% of the people use smartphones to go on the Internet. Taichung’s age-friendly app location helps the elderly enjoy a better life by providing locations, activities, social welfare for senior citizens and medical services.

Mr Takashi Obi, professor at the Imaging Science and Engineering Laboratory of the Tokyotech in Japan, created an e-ID card for multi-use purposes. This national e-ID card allows moving toward better infrastructures for e-business. “We are ready to provide the real deal for the citizens” he says. The e-ID card offers a fusion of services:

• Use of alternative cards;
• Support for multi-devices;
• Health insurance.

The purpose of this card is to make healthcare and banking easier for the citizens.

Anne-lise Thieblemont, Senior Director for Government Affairs at Qualcomm, USA, elaborated on the concept of smart buildings and energy management. Over 50% of the population lives in cities. The quality of infrastructure, lights, water, transportation, and energy supply needs to be improved but achieving this is quite a challenge, and requires innovation and culture change. Qualcomm uses a combination of connectivity to bring people, cities and transports together to improve safety. How do we scale across the city and provide solutions from a city to another? We do that by connecting people to public safety (hospitals…). The society has to move towards a smart energy and smart building system. Intelligent connectivity is at the core of smart cities. Creating new business models represents both a challenge, and big opportunities.

Peter Sonntagbauer, Senior Project Director, Cellent AG, Future Policy Modeling, Austria, is the head of FUPOL, the leading ICT solution for policy design and implementation. According to him, the leading ICT solution for policy design and implementation of guidelines, communicates effectively with citizens, and simulates the impact of policy change to see what the final impact on the city would be.  The process requires active participation of citizens. Mr. Sonntagbauer also touched upon the UN habitats which are pilot-projects for FUPOL.

Giorgio Prister, President of Major Cities of Europe in Italy, closed this session focusing on the key elements of the citizen’s system.

This Tuesday session was about Business Models 2.0; more specifically, about what might come after the digital revolution – a paradigm that can be sustained by information technology.

Mr. Jean-François Soupizet, an independent consultant from France who moderated this session, launched it by stating that we used to talk about progress in the past. But since a couple of years ago we rather talk about innovation which is an actual trend and an interesting fact.

The floor was then given to Mr. Michael Stankosky, a Research Professor from George Washington University, USA who’s a specialist of organizational knowledge. His point of view about what a business model 2.0 should tackle is related to the field of a knowledge-based economy.

The idea is to capitalize on knowledge assets, which represent 70% of current business’ assets (according to the facts he gave) by making them productive. The current problem with the utilization of these strategic assets is related to awareness: some industries might have valuable intangible assets but at the same time they might not be aware of their existence or don’t have the required know-how to make them profitable. These intangible, knowledge assets include: human capital, organizational capital, relationship capital and intellectual property within the organization. He then gave the example of the Nigerian economy that increased its GDP by revaluating its movie industry.

No one knows how to benefit from knowledge, and turn it into profit. If we knew, we would make 200% return on assets. Critical for turning organization knowledge assets into significant measurable outputs (measurable outputs defined as increase of organizations effectiveness, efficiency and innovation, and ultimately increase of profitability, and return on assets) are the effective processes of: codification of knowledge, collaboration, convergence and coherence.

The next speaker was Mr. Olivier Gudet, Head of Telecom in SIG-Services in Switzerland. In his opinion, Business Models 2.0 are based on telecommunication. As we are at the beginning of the digital revolution we need to use telecommunication as a key factor in order to built new roads.

In Geneva before 2009, there were only few networks, and only B2B. Then SIG-Services built a FTTH (fiber to the home) network. In the meantime, they connected the mobile phones antenna of Sunrise and Orange and for security purposes, the webcams of a neighborhood in Geneva.

He ended his presentation quoting an example of the city of Stockholm, which gained a triple return on investment after building the FTTH network. This started a circle of opportunities for companies and citizens of Stockholm. It also fosters new investments which are often rewarded, and may lead to further investment.

Dr. Hesham A. Lofty addressed the topic of this session differently by asking the audience a simple question: “What has to be prioritized?” Today, people tend to talk about innovation or in this case about Business Model 2.0 by pointing out how profitable it could be for a firm. However, other matters should be taken in consideration, such as environmental matters. He took the example of the fish overexploitation that began a few decades ago. In his opinion, intelligence and ICT development should first and foremost be used for fixing these environmental issues, and then used for profit-making. “If we eat everything we will only then realize that we can’t eat money.”

Mr. Michal Ivantyšyn, co-founder and Director of ITAPA Congress, Slovakia, talked about the e-government strategy in Slovakia, and open data as a new driving force for the 21^st century. During his presentation he quoted several adages:

• Moore’s law – the cost of computing power halves every 18 months;
• Eroom’s law of pharmaceutical R&D – cost of medical drug research per unit doubles every 9 months;
• Parkinson law describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time.

Mr. Ivantyšyn opines that it is easy to change the world and make millions of dollars by using open data. Moreover, open data is the only way of stopping the expansion of bureaucracy. In Slovakia, a lot of data is now made public by the government. Foreign investors can now find out who won a public offer in Slovakia. Also, preparing project proposals in Slovakia will be much easier and much cheaper. Along with many new ways to come, this approach would help curb the ever-growing bureaucratic apparatus.

Mr. Van Khai Nguyen, CEO, Cadcamation SA, Association InnoLab Switzerland, talked about the after-digital revolution – the new manufacturing paradigm. There will be 9 billion people by 2050 but this shouldn’t be a problem, as the increase of population is slowing, and GDP is also increasing and giving welfare to the people. What we should change is the way we manufacture products. First of all, we should produce products nearer to the consumer. We should also have a fairer trade policy, so that profits don’t end up in the richer countries. The Internet of things will help with that. Objects will interact and adapt with their environment. The human must understand all of this, not to be overwhelmed by technology. Big data must help us bring new wisdom to society.

Mr. Paul K. Wormelli, Innovation Strategist at Wormelli Consulting LLC, USA, talked about the impact of new business models on government. Governments are lagging behind industry by 3 or 5 years. Two things influence the government the most:

• The biggest IT solution providers shift their strategy to adopt a consumer-driven point of view.
• We used to count things with IT, now the purpose is to provide insights with technology.

Governments recognize that they have to adopt an enterprise mindset which may lead to a lot of competition but will prioritize fresh thinking. Knowledge is not what it used to be 10 or 20 years ago. Nowadays, knowledge is in the network: the human network, technology network and social network. This has led to collective intelligence which has to be used by the government.

Governments are trying to figure out how to gather this knowledge. This should lead to higher customer/citizen satisfaction. Citizens have become vital to the governments, and should share their responsibilities, and be involved with the government. Ultimately, this involvement will transform the governmental apparatus.

The last presenter, Mr. Shakeel Tufail, CEO of SecureNinja– a security-oriented company in USA, talked about security or basically protecting an asset we value. Failure to protect one’s assets can result in loss of the asset, charges or can even cost lives. Today we estimate that 95% of cyber intrusions are due to human social interactions, which is interesting. Moreover, as we are getting more connected, our systems are rapidly becoming more complex; so rapidly that security regulations can’t keep up with this pace of change. Such a delay can have a huge negative impact on every industry. He used the example with the outage of Sony PlayStation network in April 2011 due to “external intrusion” i.e. attack by hackers.

To summarize his presentation – data, time, money, reputation, legal frameworks and governments need to be protected; otherwise it would compromise the effectiveness of the Business Model 2.0.

Moderator: Alan Shark, Executive Director of PTI (Public Technology Institute); Associate Professor of Practice, Rutgers University, School of Public Affairs & Administration, USA.

Clément Allain – R&D Project Manager Institut de l’Elevage, France

François Blanc – Director Digital Evolution ERDF – Electricité & Réseau de France, France

Mariane Cimino – Consultant, France Génétique Elevage, France

Sami Coll – Research Fellow UNIGE- University of Geneva, Switzerland

Stéphane Grumbach – Senior Scientist, INRIA, France

Jens-Henrik Jeppesen – Director European Affairs, CDT – Center for Democracy and Technology, Belgium

Jean-Henry Morin – Associate Professor of Information Systems, UNIGE – University of Geneva, Switzerland

Hervé Rannou – CEO Items International, CEO Cityzen-Data, France

Gerald Santucci – Head of Unit Knowledge Sharing, DG CONNECT, European Commission

Alan Shark introduced this interesting topic by stating that people create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day and this trend is going to increase in the next years. How can we explain this trend? As a matter of fact, the number of users is increasing, as well as the number of interconnected machines, and this tendency allows moving from data to wisdom.

The first presenter, Clement Allain, introduced to the audience the functioning of the dairy farming using modern technologies. He began his presentation by specifying the characteristics of the dairy farming and segued to production of dairy and breeding that can be significantly improved by use of combined censors. These censors allow collecting data on the biological parameters of animals, and then this data is transformed into information and alerts for farmers. Finally, farmers can “control” these censors based on the system of alerts in a closed feedback loop.

Mr. Allain then explained why we needed this kind of technology in the agricultural industry. First of all, there are currently fewer farmers than the total number of animals all over the world. Furthermore, farmers are facing more pressure because of the growing needs of the population worldwide. Finally, farmers can manage their production depending on the price or the value of the milk on the market.

The system that Mr. Allain initially described allows another great innovation regarding dairy production, and that is proper care for the overall welfare, and the well being of the animal. But in order to provide a balanced overview of the system, Mr. Allain also specified that the system faced certain limitations, such as lack of advice. If the farmer had to deal with a sick animal, he would receive an alert but not the answer or the solution to his problem which means that the system needs to be further improved and eventually provide advice to farmers.

Mariane Cimino discussed the increase in volume of data for and from animals in the past few years, and their collection and use. According to her, previously the data was collected for programs and public research purposes. Nowadays because of regulations and R&D improvement, the data is not that relevant anymore (there is no real regulation/governance for this industry yet), but the efficacy of big data is still there. Another issue is that we are able to collect data on animals but not on the rest of the value creation chain, such as for example, the products milk, meat etc. Moreover, today we are facing a serious lack of experts in this field.

Sami Coll, a sociologist with a strong interest in epistemology, discussed two important issues. According to him, the big data does not necessarily mean social inclusion, because every one of us is “confined” in their own social bubble. Second, the data proposed to us is only information concerning our social and cultural environment.

For Mr Coll the privacy is not the solution for the spread of big data; we can promote the big data and in the meanwhile become stricter on the privacy matters.

Through his intervention Stéphane Grumbach explained that the strongest impact of data allowed inter-mediation between people and things, people and people, things and things, and hense people and knowledge. For example, the car pulling system is possible today, because it is easy to define who uses it the same way as we do, and who is the guy that you are travelling with.

Finally, Jean-Henry Morin showed that the socialization of things would generate lots of data, and everything would be connected and interconnected. According to him, we will have a social network of things soon. Furthermore, he highlighted that the European data protection framework was almost here, and it would be the measure for tackling the disruption in the collection of data.

As we can see from the discussions, the challenges of tomorrow are many. First of all, the decision-makers and governments need to restore trust in our digital society, because we cannot go forward without confidence and trust. In addition to that, the decision-makers have to fight against “the hot potato effect”.  These last decades, every institution has been passing the responsibility of managing data to one another. The real issue is to know who is capable of what, and ready to manage our data in the future. A key to this might be to improve the education. Indeed, a better education can enable insights into and better understanding of data management.

This session, built in collaboration with ITU, was chaired and moderated by Mr. Jean-Pierre Chamoux, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris Descartes, France. He introduced it by talking about ITU – the organization which has always been strongly supporting the development of telecoms, helping countries that lack knowledge in this domain, effectively establish and develop telecoms, and trying to address the development challenges on a global level related to broadband.

The session was divided in three main parts:

1. Need for infrastructure and new services (Where does the demand come from?);
2. Analysis of policies and/or existing policies;
3. Insights on typical application related to broadband.

The first presenter during this session, Mr. René Dönni Kuoni, the Director and Co-leader of the Telecom Services Division at the Swiss Federal Office for Communications (OFCOM Switzerland), focused mainly on Switzerland. He argued that the economy would become more innovative and internationally competitive through the use of ICT. Switzerland has many regulations on telecoms, and advocates that all the norms become universal so that this could lead to a relative demand.

In addition, Mr. Dönni Kuoni added that it is in the micro level where the leaders are. However, for the wireless, the Swiss don’t perform that well, and need to become more efficient. To illustrate his point, he showed a map with all the different Swiss networks. He made a remark in parenthesis regarding the Alpine region where he would like to see more megabits. The solution would be to extend the already existing cables in order to have even more megabits.

Mr. Mario Maniewicz, Chief of the Infrastructure, Enabling Environment and E-Applications Department at ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), started his presentation by giving us some general information like the fact that there are almost 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. There has been a huge expansion in developing countries as there have been many more new subscriptions over the last past years. Moreover, the mobile broadband access is in increase – a special highlight is the increase of mobile penetration in Africa. According to Mr. Maniewicz, in order to improve telecommunication, we should focus mainly on “spectrum” (radio telecommunication and radar), “standardization” and “development” (helping developing country). In conclusion he said that there were 7 billion people connected to each other, but what we wanted was to connect machine to machine.

The next presenter, Mr. Jean François Bureau, used to be NATO Assistant Secretary General in charge of public diplomacy. He was a General Controller at France’s Ministry of Defense from July 2010 to October 2011 when he joined Eutelsat as a Director responsible for Institutional and International Affairs. Mr. Bureau defined himself as a client of the space industry, and said that everything should work over satellite. Regarding the value chain of the business, he stressed the following four main aspects:

• Satellite manufacturing;
• Terrestrial terminal selling;
• Satellite operators activities; and
• Service/application selling.

The activities are mainly on the side of the developed countries – that’s where the need is, and therefore, that’s where competition is increasing.

Looking back to the past, Mr. Bureau said that France, i.e. Eutelsat in particular, had delivered 2 megabit internet connection whereas today they were able to provide 20 megabit connection which is a huge and really important increase compared to the others. The power of satellite will increase in the future – a common expectation is that it will deliver more than 50 megabits which would be a high speed Internet.

The intrinsic advantages of the satellite are:

• Fixed cost regardless of the distance;
• Previews (earthquake seen by satellite);
• Ability of satellite operators to finance the initial investment in new capacities from their own resources, and immediately provide service once the satellite is operational.

In conclusion, satellites are the solution to terrestrial problems. The main objective of putting satellite everywhere is giving people access to Internet wherever they are (instead of going to cities to access the Internet).

The second part of the conference was about Policy Making and Policy Analysis in the domain of Broadband.

The first presenter in this segment of the session, Mr. Jules Degila, a member of GIDE Advisory Council, is specialized in the optimization of telecommunication networks and systems architecture, deployment and operations. Coming from Benin, he began his speech with a little joke: “What are the two reasons why we haven’t heard about Benin? Firstly, Benin is not famous for playing soccer there, and secondly, it is a peaceful country”.

Even though Benin is a stable country and economy, there is a lack of infrastructure and with that a very limited, if any spread in broadband there. According to Mr. Degila, Benin should focus the effort on addressing these issues in the next year. Benin has already undertaken many economic reforms. The government is strongly focused on its priority to become more digitized (mainly with the use of telecommunications) in order to be able to open the country’s capital/ unleash the country’s potential. It is also committed to defining the policy in such a way to attract technology partners and investors because it broadband is an interesting market. In fact, with the appropriate technology, they can make money. Benin is an excellent transit point because it is used as a test base for people who want to invest in Nigeria.

Ms. Fadhilah Mathar, Head of Strategic Planning and Partnership Division of ICT R&D and Human Resources Development with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in the Republic of Indonesia, as well as a lecturer at the Islamic State University of Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, is actively involved in strategic formulation of ICT policy related research in Indonesia – the home of biodiversity. The Indonesian Prime Minister ensures that there is no blank spot in Indonesia, and yet there are visible obstacles such as: unequal diffusion of information access, shortage of ICT infrastructure allowing broadband access, and unfavorably high price for broadband. The main issues related to Indonesia’s broadband are the following points:

1. Supply/ infrastructure aspects – availability; accessibility, affordability.
2. Demand/ utilization and adoption – awareness and ability; e-literacy; aggregating demand;
3. Financial aspects;
4. Regulation and institutional aspects – being the most important of all.

The third and last part of this session started with Mr. Ali Kone who is currently the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Coders4Africa. Originally from Mali but born in USA, Mr. Kone has over 13 combined years of experience in application development, software architecture, agile methodology, and project management. Agreeing with Ms. Mathar’s standpoint, he said that his organization Coders4Africa, which is based mostly in Dakar, Senegal but has offices in Ghana, Ethiopia and other African countries as well, had a collaborative plan, and that they provided trainings and local applications. This company was created from an association and they develop applications depending on the needs. As an example, he pointed out a launched application for local farmers, containing a network related to cows, which enables monitoring of cows’ pregnancy, and tracking the cows. He finished his speech saying that having big data would be important for them as being part of the Cloud.

Ms. Samia Melhem is the chair of the Digital Development Community of Practice, and leads ICT’s practice Knowledge and Learning program focusing on internal and client capacity building through knowledge sharing on ICT4Ds. She argued that developing broadband in poor countries would be less affordable for them. To illustrate this she highlighted the fact that we normally spend 5% of our annual income on Internet which represents approximately 200 € per month. She asked why they would invest in public sector. To ensure the connection of regions, they substitute a portion of the investment in Eastern Africa, Western Africa, and Central Africa. In addition, they have learned that in order to grow they need to invest in Broadband. The most important sectors that should be developed are education and agriculture which as two distinct sectors do not share same needs, and should be understood/ handled differently.

In her presentation Ms. Madeleine Scherb, president and founder of Health and Environment Program (HEP), a non-governmental organization based in Cameroon with an office in Geneva, touched upon the following key aspects of Cameroon’s economy and development:

• Agriculture, industry, mining, and services are the four main sectors in Cameroon.
• Cameroon is ranked 28^th on a global level according to Internet usage.
• However, there is a staggering lack of information and medicines.

She also provided a lot of other information about her country but unfortunately was running out of time, and couldn’t further elaborate on those.

To conclude this session, Mr. Chamoux asked the speakers to summarize their views on this matter in one minute, and finished by saying: “Broadband for Development at the Global Forum is an opportunity to talk to people, and make them aware”.