Online partner meeting - September 2020

Please use this thread for any September 2020 online partner meeting related conversations

Hi all.
I am sharing quick links to community threads about updates per solution working group Ghent:

IOT Registry & APIAPI (we combined the two solutions this time, but they remain separate reusable components)
QR Toolkit Ghent
IOT Registry dataset: Urban Open Data Sheep Tracking

Looking forward to next week.

Hi all

In Aarhus we’ve discussed the need for some common guiding principles, best practice guidelines, tech stack “standards” and open source’ing guidelines for the development work to really kick in and to support co-creation and sharing. Each city seem to have their own way of doing it – some with internal developers like Gent, Amsterdam and Aarhus and some relying on external resources. Some use one tech stack and some another – and these often do not work in unison. Some are experienced in working with open source and some are not.

The lack of common/shared ways that can act as a foundation for the development projects seems to make it really hard to do actual development work together.

It’s not that everything should be uniform and leave no “wiggle room” for local considerations so maybe a “business architecture” like this would be the way to go:

Shared principles on

• Collaboration
• Tools
• Code quality
• Considerations on standards
• Deployment strategies (CI/CD)
• Open Source
• Etc.

With local implementations of these guiding principles into a few tech stacks:

• Tech stack 1 led by Aarhus: Symfony + Drupal + React
• Tech stack 2 led by Another City: tech + tech + tech
• Tech stack n …

We just discussed this shortly with Juliette who let us know that things are on the way to address this.

Anyhow - we invite all to an open discussion under the title “Considerations on code assurance” (time slot to be confirmed, see the agenda).

Regards,
Ture, Kim and other friends from Aarhus

Hey Kim,

In the beginning of SCORE we created code-quality as part of WP4.

The Standard for Public Code, which hopes to enable a standard like this for the wider public organizations software community has the same document as the start but is developed further and more complete.

Would these help with the efforts?

Today, monday 21 september from 13:30 - 14:30 in room 4 the Foundation for Public Code will be running an online version of our Governance Game workshop.

The Governance Game is a model to explore how public organisations can address challenges in collaborating on codebases. The process helps participants discover a shared vocabulary, a shared understanding of their ecosystem, and highlights their common sense of purpose.

Today, Tuesday 22 September from 13:30 to 14:30 in room 4, the Foundation for Public Code invites you to join our workshop “Communicating your codebase” to help you plan a great product page and engage with your community.

I always learn alot from and with this group of people. Im still keen on the replication part of the work we do. How we can “sell” our ideas to the municipalities and onwards. Im working on our city to sign the LIVING-IN.EU declaration because i think that is essential for our work. Id love to see you all soon so if you dare come to sweden give me a ring. There is a couch to sleep on if all else fales. CHeers! / kim

Something learned: business case (impact) and replicability- they are hard but need to be measured.
Something to improve on: work more on now producing artefacts and plan for measuring impact
A conversation you want to continue: Deployment of Citizen science app in real-world with two councils and may be more! Air quality work with Gothenburg and Bradford.

I would like to continue the conversation on Livability, MasterPortal & IoT replication.

I would like to improve the COVID situation so that we could work more directly together.

We learn so much its impossible to suggest one thing.

I learned that “Frank” was in fact “Hielke” in the end.
We should improve the curry options in all SCORE cities, replicating Bradford.
I’m especially keen to continue the conversation on tools, toolchains and shared data models.

Happy to have learned we are resilient and keeping our heads up even in difficult times; it’s a solid partnership!

Improve the connection with one and other in between meetings and calls; somehow we should find just that bit more time to connect and reconnect with each other.

I like to keep a focus on the end goals we want to achieve by making realistic steps and keep picking each others brains!

I’m going to bundle all three into one:

In order to share, we need to make things less ‘hardwired’, and a bit more interchangeable. This includes software components, and standards for data.

On the policy level, the case for sovereignty is starting to gain traction, while on the technical level components are well understood.

A good question might then be - what missing thinking or work can we do to help the problem owners/project managers, whose main responsibility is improving citizen services, to also take an interest/invest energy into the architecture or design ‘behind the curtain’ of the solution they are using.

An idea was: a) start with the problem they want to solve, b) work through how data is core to their ability to solve it now and in the future, c) work through how component and standard based systems will help them to continue solving their problems, with an emphasis on risk and governance.

Once they are convinced it is worth spending time and energy into this, things might go a bit smother?

Something we learned this week? We have learned that opportunities and barriers can be very similar that we can work together to find means of overcoming.

Something you want to improve? I want to involve more of my colleagues in establishing better outputs for SCORE.

A Conversation you want to continue? Continue investigating and investing time in what is possible for our city and cities alike. Developing the business case to make solutions more available for stakeholders/ internal problem owners.

Learned? Yes, persistence yields
Improve? Yes, learn about the underlying technologies and stacks of each solution, find out what they have in common or explore how to adopt these new approaches
Continue? Yes, the one about the SCORE hello world common starting point where the principles are applied in daily practice and onboarding developers

Learning: That for every meeting, some new and cool and exciting project pops up!

Improving: I want to improve our collaboration with other partner cities

Continuing: Working on challenges, looking into replicating stuff, having good conversations with friendly people

It’s nice to learn that, despite these weird times, we are still finding valuable ways to connect and work together. Over the upcoming weeks/months, I look forward to sharing more on my work via the community and that way improve the collaboration and to keep our conversations going also after this meeting.

During the meetings I learned that monitoring city livability is much more complex than commonly assumed. In addition to the challenges related to identifying a common set of livability indicators that would be relevant for all SCORE partners, we concluded that the desirable indicator values are highly dependent on the local context.

We should probably not aim at producing a single number summarizing livability of a neighborhood or a city, but invest more time into communicating/visualizing different livability aspects.

We will definitely continue discussion on estimating different livability aspects directly from the visual content (images) and we are curious to see what machine has to say about this highly philosophical question

SCORE in COVID numbers