Smart People

Budget Monitoring is a method that facilitates citizens to screen, assess, and actively participate in the decisions on public policy-making and government expenditure. It offers citizens the power, knowledge, and self-belief to take action for the right to live in better environments. The Center for Budgetmonitoring binds diverse community-led organizations, allowing valuable encounters among them as well as dialogue between citizens, organizations, and the government in mapping out problems and their solutions.

The municipality of Amsterdam experiments with crowdsourcing on the platform AmsterdamOpent.nl, in order to learn how interaction with civilians can support local policies.
In addition to the website www.amsterdamopent.nl, users with a Facebook profile can submit their ideas directly through a Facebook application.

Civocracy makes it easy for citizens to learn more about an issue and to express their views. Civocracy shows the best arguments and relevant news, and also gives an overview of all the ways you can be actively involved, such as attending a town hall meeting or signing up as a volunteer. This way, the connection is made between online and offline engagement. Civocracy also creates impact by inviting all key stakeholders to contribute to the discussion. This leads to relevant high-quality comments.

The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is a web-based open source data management system for the storage and distribution of data, such as spreadsheets and the contents of databases.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content. The Foundation is an international leader in its field and has extensive experience in building tools and community around open material. Their software development work includes some of the most innovative and widely acclaimed projects in the area. For example, the CKAN project is the world’s leading open source data portal platform.

FixMyTransport is a website (with a mobile phone version) developed by mySociety, that allows passengers to report issues on any public transport in the UK: train, bus, underground, tram, or coach. People can report problems online, such as broken ticket machines or buses that always leave early, and mySociety then sends the information provided straight to the correct transport operator or local authority so that action can be taken.

Mobypark, a sharing parking platform, will make parking easier and more efficient. Private parking lots, public parking garages, hotels, and hospitals: they make their unoccupied parking spots available for drivers through Mobypark. Mobypark offers all the available places on a platform where it's possible to see real time availability and book these parking spots ahead. As a result, drivers spend less time searching for a single spot and reduce CO2 emissions.

The city region of Eindhoven (SRE) is located at the hub of several international transportation routes, where relatively small incidents can have major consequences for the system as a whole. In 2011, approximately 30,000 people were killed in the European Union as a consequence of collisions in traffic. The European Commission recently adopted an ambitious Road Safety Programme, which aims to cut traffic deaths in Europe between 2011 and 2020 by 50 percent. Intelligent transport solutions (ITS) can help improve European road conditions and safety.

Forum Virium Helsinki is an innovation unit within the Helsinki City organization. It develops new digital services in cooperation with companies, other City of Helsinki units and residents. Our objective is to build better city services, create new business opportunities as well as open up new contacts for international markets. Forum Virium Helsinki’s development projects drive the creation of digital city services. From the very start, ideas under development are tested as part of users’ everyday lives. Another goal is to create new business opportunities for companies.

The Amsterdam district of Zuidoost (Southeast) is 22 km2 and is home to approximately 80,000 residents. Zuidoost is a remarkably green neighbourhood with the massive lake Gaasperplas and its surrounding forest as its centrepiece. There are also many other parks, sport parks, private garden allotments and a golf course. The urban core is centred on the Ajax ArenA football stadium, Amsterdam Poort and the newly-built Bijlmer train station which together has developed into a major shopping and entertainment zone complete with cinemas and concert halls.