This evening I attended the Melbourne Conversations event Re-creating Communities, which was run in conjunction with the Smart Cities Summit happening in Melbourne this week.
There was certainly some interesting things discussed by the panelists, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was hoping for a discussion on how to increase interactions between people within their communities, but instead it was more about how use technology to serve communities. The latter is not a bad thing - and indeed, the panelists spoke earnestly about putting people first - but the routes to all solutions seemed to be driven by technology, startups, and innovation-as-a-buzzword.
I probably got more value from reading the #melbconvo tweetstream and the thoughts it provoked.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Private public partnerships can facilitate corporate social innovation but will citizen privacy be protected? #opendata #melbconvo
— Carrie (@cangreenbechic) April 18, 2016
There was plenty of encouragement by the panelists for citizens to step up and contribute to their cities, alongside partnerships with private companies and large corporations. But what does this mean for accountability? Or as Carrie says in her tweet above, citizen data?
Panelist Frans-Anton Vermast of Amsterdam made the excellent point that governments are held accountable by elections - but he also encouraged governments to stick to its 'natural' role. Surely a government's natural role should evolve, perhaps to encapsulate some services that are initially provided by citizens, start-ups or corporations? Resilience is important after all!
I wonder if there's the potential for closer partnerships with governments to ensure the reliability of these services they enable and promote, as well as safeguards for our data that we may share with such services.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Millennial telling us they invented co-living & nobody else thought of it #melbconvo
— now, voyager (@nowvoyager_) April 18, 2016
One of my concerns with audience questions is so often they're couched within agendas. This evening, one audience member asked a question about the potential of co-living in tackling challenges around affordable housing, community engagement, and sharing resources. The problem was that the person asking already knew the answer he wanted to hear (that co-living should be embraced) and expressed it with a heavy dose of generational ego - something @nowvoyager_ found frustrating (as did I).
One panelist asked the questioner to explain what co-living is, and got a buzzword-heavy answer that had far too much fluff but not much in the way of concrete, practical detail. Unsurprisingly, the panel sidestepped the question.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>#melbconvo Damn! Q about "what's scary about smart cities" just got lost in shuffle. Best one of the night :-/ Twitter! What do you think?
— David Robertson (@Davesci) April 18, 2016
However, that audience member had actually asked an interesting question - spotted by David above - but it just wasn't clear: what scarier aspects of smart cities - the downsides, the unexpected problems - have governments and communities come across? And how have they been addressed? It would have been great to hear the panel answer that!
The final audience question for the night was an expression of concern about how our societies are already so tightly intertwined with technology, and the fact that we're leaning even more heavily on it as the saviour for our governments and society is worrying. The panel didn't really provide much in the way of an answer (perhaps due to the fact that they were running out of time), but I think it did highlight an untapped avenue of discussion: how we improve human interactions in our societies, not just the services government provides to us.