IBM today announced a plan to give away $50 million of its services and technology over the next three years to 100 municipalities through a program the company is calling the Smarter Cities Challenge.

Funded via IBM’s philanthropic division, according to an IBM press statement, the Smarter Cities program aims to help municipalities around the world— with populations of 100,000 to 700,000 ideally— solve local problems in any of the following areas: healthcare, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy, and utilities.

The approximate value of each Smarter Cities Challenge grant will be equivalent to US$400,000. The company has alrady completed or is currently conducting a series of pilot grants in Baltimore, Maryland; Austin, Texas; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Other municipalities can apply online via SmarterCitiesChallenge.org, and will be selected based on a number of criteria including their track record of problem solving, commitment to the use of technology and open data, and willingness to provide IBM with access to and time with city leaders.

Teams of IBM experts will provide chosen cities with recommendations for better delivery of municipal services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency and access to proprietary IBM technology like the company’s CityForward

, a kind of social network for city leaders, academics, and citizens that is also a city data analysis and data visualization platform.

The grant giving entity IBM stands to prime their sales pipeline by increasing their experience in Gov 2.0, Healthcare and Smart Grid verticals, with their generous, charitable effort.

get widgetminimize

CrunchBase Information

IBM

Website:	ibm.com
Location:	Armonk, New York, United States
Founded:	1896

IBM, acronym for International Business Machines, is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. IBM… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

The eCitizen Foundation, in partnership with e-Democracy.org, has launched a research project for best practices with notices and agendas for public meetings, sometimes called open meetings. 

For more information on our approach, please see: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Public_Meeting_Notices_and_Agendas

To participate in a feedback session on our draft approach, please register at: http://publicmeetingsnov2010.eventbrite.com/

More information about this project from the e-democracy is available at: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/publicmeetings

Highlights

As of October 29, highlights of the draft approach include the following:

A. Guidelines

Public Meeting Notices and Agendas is intended to help local and larger jurisdictions and other interested parties the understanding and best practices for creating a healthy ecology of public notices within a larger civic ecology. Towards this we have a few guidelines:

• Jurisdictions should not have to cede identity, jurisdiction or oversight over their public notice systems as part of any contract or terms of service.
  • However, jurisdictions may be held responsible for other sorts of provisions including paying for services and materials necessary to publish and syndicate the notice information.
• Jurisdictions should not limit access to the information that is published for any reason including jurisdiction, constituency, payment, and authentication for any purpose. However, based on sound and reasonable methods, jurisdiction should be encouraged to limit participation to any criteria that is understood, explicit and based on previously instituted rules, laws and regulations.
• Regardless of any additional methods of conveying the information contained in a public meeting notice, there must be a main method which is both human readable and machine processable.
• Aggregators, re-publishers and value add systems must always link and/or cite to the original and authoritative published version without any additional cost or proscriptions regarding the original content.

B. How to Publish an Online and Printable Public Meeting Notice with Agendas

1. Principles:

   • Everything should be at a URL (time/date, location, jurisdiction, agenda items, people)
   • Every section of the page itself should be individually at a URL fragment and authoritatively citable and use embedded self-cite recommendation) so that each can have “Share-Like” functions.
   • Everything should cite to authoritative source and be citable (self-cites)
   • Standards for “Semantic” or “XHTML” for each component (e.g. RDFA for cal/time, microformats for events)
   • Include links to alternative standards (e.g. iCal, RSS, etc)
   • There should be a QR barcode for online, printed and mobile versions and other versions optionally.
   • Every page should use “pop-ups” recommendation (“Preview Online Page Universal Page Standard”)
   • Point to the Rules under which the meetings will be held

2. Processes:

   • Applicable Procedures (quorum requirements, other rules for each part of meeting)
   • Commenting on Items, etc in advance of meeting.

3. Policies

   • Public vs. Private
   • Authenticated vs Psydonym vs Anonymous Participation and Personalization
   • Comment and Participation and Collaboration (including policy and process for entertaining contributions that are not directly germane – e.g. “out of order” or “out of scope” and how those determinations are made for comments and online participation rather than in-meeting live rulings on points of order)
   • Proprietariness and Propriety – gift-ban rules on free services? Need for RFP or Public Notice to use Vendor?

4. Business and Functional:

   • Workflow for Public Employees and Officials (or authorized agents acting on their behalf) to auto-generate or manually create, amend or replace public meeting notices and agendas.
   • Required and Recommended Tasks: Publicize Broadly and Inform Relevant Constituencies, etc (check-list)
   • Role of “For Profit” “Non Profit” and other External Entities in Providing Services and in the Ecology of this information, communication and collaboration.

5. Examples of Meeting Notices and Agenda

   • Notice
   • Agenda
   • Pre-Meeting Phase
   • Meeting Phase
   • Post-Meeting Phase
   • Archive and Access

 

Another example of how to make information for the public more informative, easier to consume and share.