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SCP E150 Episode 150 Celebration: Ask Zoe Anything!

In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, host Zoe Eather is back in the hot seat! In celebration of this being episode 150, Zoe and producer Ellen Ronalds Keene sat down for a chat where she answers questions from you, the audience of the Smart Community Podcast. 

We can’t believe we’re at 150 episode and it’s fitting that this celebratory episode is the first episode of 2020. 2019 was a whirlwind year and 2020 is shaping up to be just as exciting. 

Zoe answers 3 questions today from the many that were sent through via LinkedIn and email. Thank you to those of you who submitted questions! We will be doing more ‘AZA’ episodes this year so we can answer more of your questions throughout the year.

As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it. 

Listen here: 

The questions we cover in this episode:

  1. Terry Lee Williams asked: Has anyone who has invested in a particular Smart City scheme or project measured the real, direct financial benefits in savings?
  2. Chris Cooper (who was on Episode 92!) asked: Do you know of any places out there using open data to change the political discourse between citizens and decision makers, to change opinions and shift measurement of ‘what good looks like’? At the moment the data is not necessarily trusted and therefore is not actively used in decision making. 
  3. Kerry Miles asked: What are the characteristics of a Smart City? Is it just a utopian concept? If it isn’t just a utopian concept, what are the top five things that make a city Smart?

Quotes:

“Over the short term, we can definitely look at those direct savings but only if we set up the measuring and monitoring at the get go.”

“What I realised in the increasing maturity of this Smart

City space is that when we can actually show numbers we can get the engineers and the accountants in the room.

[Because we need] not just the people that have vision, which is really important, but pragmatic people…we need to have those steps taken as well.”

“It’s no longer good enough to be wasting money just because we couldn’t keep up to date or change our process or the way we’re thinking.”

“We’re not just talking about [you or me, because] we’re doing okay, but people with the most at stake. We owe it to people to actually use the richest data sets that we have…What is the point of having all this data if we’re not using it to make important decisions for the public good?”

Links Zoe mentions in this episode: 

Previous episodes mentioned in this episode:

Connect:

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital

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