Category: Information Operations (IO)

6 inconvenient truths about Smart Cities

I’ll explore six “inconvenient truths” in this article to describe why I think that’s the case; and what we can do about it:

1. The “Smart City” isn’t a technology concept; it’s the political challenge of adapting one of the most powerful economic and social forces of our time to the needs of the places where most of us live and work.
2. Cities won’t get smart if their leaders aren’t involved.
3. We can’t leave Smart Cities to the market, we need the courage to shape the market.
4. Smart cities aren’t top down or bottom up. They’re both.
5. We need to tell honest stories.
6. No-one will do this for us – we have to act for ourselves.

I've used Netvibes as an RSS reader for years. I particularly how easy it is to sync my attentional priorities to my on-screen info-flow by dragging higher priority tabs to the left and positioning the most important feeds at the top of their tab pages. If I am more pressed for time, I can just skim the headlines in the leftmost tab and/or topmost row of feeds (of course the actual way one positions feeds and tabs is arbitrary — the point is to pay attention to your priorities and go through the actions of rearranging your information flows to match. It's a tool for taking control of both the screen-side and mind-side aspects of infotention. This new service appears to be an expansion of the dashboard capabilities to include something similar to (and Netvibes claims more powerful than) IFTTT — which I confess I have not done more than dabbled in.

A Dashboard That Lets You Easily Connect Web Services, From Email to Twitter