December 21, 2021
Daniel Stölzle is sitting in his living room. No, not in his own home, as we are already used to from countless video calls, but in the office of his employer, Mainzer Stadtwerke AG. There, the innovation manager and his colleagues have given up an open-plan office to set up the innovation room, affectionately known as the “living room”, instead. This is where knowledge sharing and collaboration begin at the lowest level. But he and his colleagues not only share their knowledge within their own organization – but also beyond the city limits in the Urban Data Community (UDC).
Open collaboration as a driver for new tools and technologies
“Our focus here is on generating added value from data in order to meet the challenges of our time as efficiently as possible with data- and evidence-based solutions. But this requires collaboration on several levels,” explains Daniel Stölzle. This is one of the reasons why Mainz’s municipal utilities have become part of the UDC: a community that was founded to connect smart city stakeholders at an inter-municipal level, to get them talking to each other about urban data – and to take action together to quickly put the solutions found into practice. The community is organized by DKSR as a provider and partner and by the Fraunhofer IAO, in whose innovation network “Morgenstadt” the community has its roots.
During the first meetings of the community, it quickly became clear that various municipal stakeholders were faced with almost identical tasks and questions:
How can we water our green spaces as needed, even in hot summers? How can we recognize parking offenders at e-charging stations? How can we motivate our city dwellers to leave their cars behind and switch to public transport?
These are precisely the challengesfor which intelligent solutions can be created with the help of data – and these digital solutions are actually easily transferable. So why should every municipality in Germany have to keep reinventing the wheel? This is where the work of the Urban Data Community comes in. It creates a platform for developing replicable templates from local use cases. “The great added value of the UDC is the organized collaboration – and the approach that we can let others benefit from the solutions we develop,” says Daniel Stölzle.
This is the fundamental mindset of the community: sharing is better than thousands of partial solutions. This creates synergy effects that ultimately benefit all members. The group uses regular digital exchange formats to talk shop, compare and critically discuss; soon, project-specific feedback will also be obtained in open review meetings. This enables a quick exchange on how an initial use case can be set up, for example, or which sensors have been used to good effect in a particular context. Or is joint procurement even worthwhile at some point?
More motivation with Community Coins
To support sharing and the give & take process, the community would like to establish a bonus system in the future. “In a community, everyone is rarely equally active – and not everyone has made the same amount of progress,” is the honest reflection in a meeting. The bonus system is intended to prevent members who were involved in the development of use cases from being disadvantaged in terms of their commitment compared to new members, for example.
A corresponding pilot system has therefore been under development for two months under the leadership of the Morgenstadt Initiative. “As a member, you earn coins if, for example, you finance a technical platform component that other members can later use. The motivating thing about this is that you can use the coins again later for your own projects; they grant a discount, so to speak, and fuel further development,” says Eva Ottendörfer, head of the Urban Governance Innovation team and the Morgenstadt Initiative at Fraunhofer IAO.
It is precisely this principle that underlines how the community works: ideas emerge in a co-creative process within the community and are catalyzed and organized with the support of the UDC team. The Morgenstadt Initiative creates the link to science, while DKSR has the task of mediating in the economic ecosystem.
In 2022, the community will gain another feature: it will have its own virtual place to exchange ideas in the new DKSR info portal. An overview of what the community offers and how municipalities and municipal companies can participate can also be found at here already.
Anyone who would like to find out more is welcome to contact Eva Schmitz!