Key Smart City Leaders: Brian Dillard, Chief Innovation Officer, City of San Antonio; Emily Royall, Smart City Administrator, City of San Antonio; Candelaria Mendoza, Digital Inclusion Administrator, City of San Antonio
Main Smart City Priorities: Although San Antonio’s smart city office has existed since 2018, the city has recently taken a different approach to smart city development that puts people first and prioritizes residents’ needs.
The city is developing a smart city roadmap it aims to release in the fall, according to Emily Royall, San Antonio’s smart city administrator. “We want to really identify what the outcomes are for our residents across all of the projects that we work on,” she says. “How can we build new methods and ways to engage our residents more authentically?”
The city’s key domains of focus are around infrastructure, data and data governance, cybersecurity, inclusive digital services, and public participation.
Chief Innovation Officer Brian Dillard says that after he, Royall and Digital Inclusion Administrator Candelaria Mendoza were hired in late 2018, they went out into the city’s communities to conduct surveys and identify residents’ pain points. “What are their challenges they face day to day, and how can we solve those with smart city solutions rather than what are the cool, smart city solutions that a vendor wants us to deploy?” he says.
The city also rolled out a program called SmartSA Sandbox. The outdoor, festival-style events allow residents to get informed about smart cities in general as well as the city’s upcoming or active smart city projects. The Sandbox events provide demonstrations of smart city technologies and allow residents to provide input on what they would like to see in future projects.
“I think the key to becoming a people-centered smart city is reducing the barriers to access and creating opportunities to collaborate with our residents and doing that in ways that make them feel the most comfortable, in ways that they understand.” Royall says.
San Antonio uses its SmartSA Sandbox events to engage the local community about smart cities. Source: City of San Antonio
That community engagement revealed that residents’ main concerns were around “foundational items” to city life, Dillard says, such as flooding, lighting issues and traffic congestion.
How the City Uses and Shares Smart City Data: San Antonio has a Data Governance Administrative Directive, an executive order issued by the city manager. It asks every department to nominate one or two data stewards to be responsible for complying with all the elements of the policy that focus on data governance, Royall says.
Those data stewards must learn how to classify data and learn what data in their department is classified as open, sensitive or confidential. They also gain the tools to handle all those different types of classifications appropriately, according to Royall.
If data is open data, it gets put into San Antonio’s open data platform, which leverages an enterprise data sharing platform the city co-built with Google, Royall says.
San Antonio is trying to change the culture around data sharing by getting departments to “think differently about how they use data and also understand the value of data as a service that they provide to our residents through our open data portal,” Royall says. The effort that will likely take a few years to fully develop, but it is underway and backed up with resources and training around data utilization, classification, integrity and analysis.
Dillard says training, trust and technology are the pillars of the cultural shift around data sharing. San Antonio aims to break down silos of information by identifying the benefits for sharing data between agencies. The city works to streamline a department’s ability to upload data and enable different data storage models to filter into its open data platform.
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