CitySDK Consortium Photograph from 2012
Dear friends,
We’ve had a successful first year on the “CitySDK” project culminating with our first project review in Brussels. During the year we’ve worked across 8 European cities, with 23 partners, to develop the first draft of the CitySDK “a service development toolkit” API For cities, which will enable developers to create new interoperable applications.
It’s been a year of sharing knowledge between our project partners – and from the start of the project – when we met in Brussels in January – we’ve brought in developers and city administrations to share their good practice.
Each of the 8 cities has engaged with their own developer and business community to raise awareness of what we are doing and we’ve been pleased with the positive response – with businesses seeing the benefits of a shared “SDK” to make the services they provide more sustainable. As the applications market matures, cities are also looking at better ways of delivering new and innovative services to citizens, and realise that opening up their data and providing easy to use and access interfaces is key to enabling this.
Highlights of the year included meeting developers of Appsterdam winner Park Shark; presenting a city visualisation at the PICNIC festival (link); sharing best practice around “reuse and replication” of services at the FutureEverything festival; experiencing the transport in Istanbul and hearing of their plans to use open data to improve their traffic situation; and joining with the open communities of the OKFest in Helsinki – including sharing good practice from “apps for Europe” partners.
Early in the new year, the first projects to use the citySDK APIs, developing participation application in Helsinki, tourism in Lisbon and mobility in Amsterdam, will be released.
All the best for the holiday season and looking forward to 2013!
The CitySDK Consortium