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Imagine checking sensors out of the BPL that tie into a massive city sensor network
By adamg on Tue, 12/06/2016 - 12:26pm
The city's Office of New Urban Mechanics, which tries to come up with all sorts of cool techie ways for the city to improve basic services (speaking of which, will City Hall get a Twitter-controlled Christmas tree this year?) has published a manifesto, or what they call a playbook on their efforts so far to build a sensor-meshed "Smart City" and where it wants to go from here (published on github, for the techies, no less.)
It starts with the candid observation that "So far, every 'Smart City' pilot project that we’ve undertaken here in Boston has ended with a glossy presentation, and a collective shrug."
They start by telling salespeople from "Internet of Things" companies (IP-enabled thermostats and light bulbs - all taken over by hackers a couple minutes after they're turned on!) to leave them alone:
We’ve got nothing against sales people. Many of us have sold things. But we’re getting calls every day from “IoT” vendors and we’re really tired of talking to your sales teams. We don’t even know why or how we’d use your product. You might think that your technology is ready for prime-time, but we’re not ready to buy it and put it up all over Boston. At some point, we’ll know what we need and we’ll need someone to talk to about dollars and cents, feature roadmaps, etc. Right now, in 2016, there are much bigger questions unanswered.
So send us someone who knows about cities, someone who wants to walk in the shoes of our City workers or talk to residents about what they love (and don’t love!) about Boston. Send us someone who’s looking for more than a 30-minute pitch or a relationship to manage. We’d love to have a relationship with you - but it needs to be a real one.
But speaking of IP-enabled everything, another scenario involves the pixie-dust sensors some dream of sprinkling everywhere:
When we day-dream about Boston’s use of sensors, we imagine a city in which residents could check sensors out of the Boston Public Library, and use them to answer their own questions. That way, they’d only be used by real people to answer real questions or solve real problems. That sounds far-fetched, but it’s the kind of thing that we’re aspiring to.
There are four other scenarios - one of which involves the privacy ramifications of ubiquitous sensors, which the office says it's working on with, among others, the ACLU.
H/t Chris Devers.
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Comments
Do the boring work first
Cities of the future where your device is tied into internet-enabled every other device ever and you can wave your internet bracelets at the library door and have books beamed into your brain etc etc is all well and good but
Why not work on boring unfun groundwork so that all those startreky gadgets actually work?
Boston relies on so much tech and research and 'innovation economy' and there's barely working internet service in some neighborhoods of the city. I'd love to work from home more but Comcast is the only provider on our street and knows it, throttling speeds and generally being everything wrong with Comcast. The fact I can't buy reliable, high speed, municipal broadband is ridiculous.
Or how about the fact that every city and state agency and politician all have different social media accounts, with no attempt to aggregate any of it (except by Adam!) Why can't we have a smart crawl of all these disparate accounts uploaded to one central feed? I wanted to go to the new ice rink this weekend but it was closed - no information on city of boston, but something buried in the twitter feed of some downtown business district thing that nobody had ever heard of telling everybody it wasn't open yet. Or having to find the Newton PD twitter specifically to find out when roads are open after the marathon? This is all data that exists, be smart with it.
These are boring petty problems but fixing boring petty problems makes everything more functional and then you can work towards fun SESORZ EVERYWHAR problems. Just seems like tech for tech's sake half the time.
Do we really want to add
Do we really want to add public infrastructure to the internet of things which can be hacked for nefarious purposes?
On the other hand the MBTA signal system might run better thanks to hackers along with most of the traffic signals in the city.
Internet of Things is...
Solutions in search of problems. Most of what's needed in the city is a little more boring basic investment in things like education, civic participation, and regular infrastructure maintenance and renewal. Not that IoT can't help those things but it ain't a magic bullet.
Buzz word bingo
Maybe not what they're talking about, but having libraries checkout things like IR Heat Sensors so that people can scan their house for sources of drafts would be a good use of grant money. You can rent these at the big box hardware stores but no reason not to make them free or cheap at libraries.
no reason not to make them
So you're going to cut a check? The city has permanently 'underperforming' schools and branch libraries threatened with closing on a returning basis. There's your reason.
Whoever wrote that sounds a
Whoever wrote that sounds a little full of themselves, boasting about launching a see-click-fix clone, an overprices squarespace-inspired web redesign, and a vanilla next-bus service.
No, you're not at the "cutting edge of technology". If you were actually at the cutting edge of technology, then you would understand that the cutting edge is not the place to be.
Monetization of IoT
The big gap between IoT and scale is that it has to cut out pain and cut out costs. Are the current use cases cool? Sure. I think we all love being able to turn down the AC from our smart phones 30 minutes before we walk through the door. However, when a vendor pitches the city of Boston a piece of earth shattering technology that will save time, make their jobs easier, and save real money I'm sure they'll sit up and pay attention. Until then it's all bells and whistles.
Checking sensors out of Boston Public Library.
To say the obvious - one of our regulars was right after all.