MAKING CITIES RESILIENT & SUSTAINABLE WITH OPENSOURCE SOLUTIONS: OPPORTUNITIES FOR CITIES, BUSINESSES, AND UNIVERSITIES

Representatives from Fiware’s executive team from Europe and Latin America engaged with U.S. cities and decision-makers at Smart City Expo Miami during a panel discussion.

Fiware Foundation—the nonprofit organization encouraging the adoption of open standards using open-source technologies to develop smart solutions on a global basis—took the stage at Smart City Expo Miami. Representatives from Fiware’s executive team from Europe and Latin America engaged with U.S. cities and decision-makers. Tony Fortenberry (state and local government, smart solutions at Red Hat), Praveen Ashok Kumar (senior technical program manager at US Ignite), John Wood (business development manager at Libelium), Michael Pegues (CIO and acting chief information security officer for the City of Aurora), Jem Pagán (CEO at BluSky Consulting, LLC), and Salim Bendris (executive vice president global sales at Nivid Technologies) gathered on stage for an impactful panel discussion on making cities resilient and sustainable with open-source solutions. The session was moderated by Mike Barlow, an award-winning journalist and author, who, together with the panelists, took a deep dive into open source, its philosophy, opportunities, and technology drivers, as well as how Fiware supports cities in the use of open-source solutions to become smart(er), more sustainable, and more resilient. Here are some of the most impactful statements of the panel guests:

Straight from the opening, Tony Fortenberry (Red Hat) stated, “Open source is a paradigm, not a product. The principle behind open source is that none of us is as smart as all of us together. If you have a global community of people contributing to technology, then you think globally, but when acting locally, you use something specific to your needs and build just what you need. You consume just what you need, but then you donate back your contribution to the greater community. Therefore, you don’t have to solve it all. You can just solve the small piece you need, but as part of an ever-growing set of solutions. In this manner, projects at the city level can be as sophisticated as projects at the state level, which can be as sophisticated as the projects at the federal level or in private corporations. It’s a great equalizer. It’s also a great way to have diversity of technology. I think it’s really how we’re able to modernize with the velocity and currency of the modern world without having to rebuild all the infrastructure, redo everything from scratch every time.”

Taking on the topic of open source, author Mike Barlow highlighted the importance of Fiware’s role in the evolving open-source movement. “Fiware is a curated framework of open-source platform components. In other words, it’s an enabler. It makes it possible for it to happen. Fiware isn’t telling you how to do it. It’s just saying: If you want to do this, we’re going to make it possible for you because when you have this platform of components, then you can accelerate the development of your smart city solutions. Together with its members and partners, Fiware Foundation drives the definition and the implementation of key open standards that enable the development of portable and interoperable smart city solutions.”

John Wood (Libelium), together with their recently acquired company HOPU, has been collaborating with Fiware almost since day one in the role of an innovator, system integrator, smart solutions provider, and a Fiware Gold member. Many of their references and 300 other city implementations of Fiware partners can be found in Fiware’s Smart Cities Book (ed. 4). Wood explained their successful strategy and project realizations: “We are fully committed to supplying Fiware-ready solutions. We believe that this is a technology that adapts perfectly to a smart city scenario for many reasons. This is an open-source technology. We are not creating a vendorspecific silo; we are using this technology because it enables innovation and adapts well to solving the problems in smart cities, which is what this is all about.”

Salim Bendris (Nivid Technologies), sharing his experience, added: “We have developed a Fiware iHub at our Virginia headquarters. We work with the universities to expose and encourage their engagement with open source through Fiware. We raise awareness about the solutions available by sharing and building access through various technologies that are currently and continually being developed. Support from and of Fiware is strong in a multitude of industries and cities alike. They have onboarded 300+ cities globally that are using the platform, a clear indication of the growing adoption and what we can all do to assist and build a smarter future. Belonging to the Fiware community and sharing the advancements of all partners and supporters has helped us both independently and as a part of a technology community.”

During the vivid discussion, Jem Pagán (BluSky) commented: “Some data sources restrict; how do we share them? We are living in a world where we realize that data fusion centers, data sharing, and data-anything raise more alarms than opportunities. So, you need a platform that is open enough to remove the risk of centralization without decentralization—to form a checkand-balance model, either way, works— depending on what a city wants to deploy. A platform like Fiware, which is ubiquitous by nature, can give you that data ontology. To create an actionable data ontology, you need an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in research and all sorts of design parameters to get to that state alone. I would adopt Fiware for data ontology if nothing else because when I adopt Fiware, I have access to over 300 participating cities globally, which takes significant risk away from smart city adoption when shared resources are made available to the public.”

Later, the experts concurred that another topic became even more evident during and after COVID in the realization of smart cities: broadband access for the communities. According to Barlow, broadband access is fundamental to economic success, fairness, social equity, and social justice. In this view, he posed the question of how to ensure that all communities, including disadvantaged communities, have broadband access and how to prevent this critical issue of broadband access from getting lost in the noise.

Michael Pegues (City of Aurora) explored this question by focusing on fiber as the fourth utility: “I believe that technology is that common denominator for local and global growth. When we start to talk about broadband, we need to look at it from the perspective of it being a necessity vs. a privilege. I can see what we’re doing in Aurora, and there are other pockets of communities throughout the United States, but it’s not at the proliferation where it needs to be. A lot of that’s driven by the federal lobbyists and the companies.”

Fortenberry concluded by adding his expectation: “I would encourage people in the States to not look at this as an exotic European solution but to look at it as people and organizations are investing in the collective growth of open-source solutions.”

Fiware is a major flagship PPP (private-public partnership) active on all continents and has become the open-source technology of choice and the global de-facto standard for smart villages, cities, and regions. It builds an open, sustainable ecosystem around public, royaltyfree, implementation-driven, and interoperable software platform standards that eases the development of new smart applications in multiple sectors besides smart cities, such as smart energy, smart water, smart agrifood, or smart industry. With more than 565 members, 33 iHubs (innovation hubs) around the world, 150+ evangelists, and more than 8,000 developers from the global ecosystem contributing to the technology roadmap and the FIWARE Marketplace, FIWARE continues to work and collaborate with U.S. cities, private companies, universities, and standardization organizations.

Fiware will be back with a handful of dates for its 2023 U.S. Roadshow, where you can meet the North American teams and partners and engage, learn, and talk about challenges and the latest innovative solutions based on open-source technologies and smart transformation journeys.