In the context of the cooperation between the European Network of Living Labs and the World Bank, CitySDK is one of the smart city projects that can solve problems in cities in developing countries.
CitySDK was presented during a workshop with the Open Data team from the Municipality of Cali to highlight the importance of opening city interfaces to developers. According to Wikipedia, Cali is the second biggest Colombian city (2.5M inhabitants), with a local government that is strongly investing in citizen participation and open government initiatives.
Taking the first steps towards Open Data, the city saw an opportunity of cooperation with CitySDK through the usage of existing APIs, which were created and are already working in other cities. A very interesting point that resulted from this collaboration was that the challenges for Open Data in Cali are the same than in many European cities. Problems such as lack of quality data, data spread in different silos inside the organizations or vendor lock-in were identified in Cali and had been solved by the CitySDK cities. The exchange of lessons learned and experiences was very fruitful.
CitySDK is willing to collaborate in opening data and interfaces in cities all around the world. Should your city be interested in cooperating with us, please let us know.