Here in Cologne we have made a dedicated push towards our citizen engagement initiatives in the Stegerwald Settlement, where a number of smart solutions are going to be rolled out. Just before the end of 2015 we held a citizen event with local residents where we shared information on the GrowSmarter project and also gave the opportunity for citizens to get involved through our Community Reporter programme.

Our colleagues and partners at Urbis Up are in the process of collecting different data sets to be fed into a data platform to help us work more strategically when it comes to traffic planning.



Action area 1: Low-Energy Districts
Citizen involvement: the Stegerwald Settlement
To see all the measures to be implemented, click here.

Just in time for the year’s end (24 November, 2015 to be exact!), the City of Cologne hosted an event to inform residents from the Stegerwald settlement about the GrowSmarter project and the impact it would have for them locally.

Our goal was to take tenants and other interested attendees on a journey into the future of their residence, gain acceptance and encourage active involvement in the measures such as smart home, car sharing, data information etc.


Tenants meeting © Stadt Köln, RheinEnergie

The tenants meeting was also an opportunity for local project partners (RheinEnergie, AGT International, ampido, cambio carsharing, DEWOG, KVB, ui – the urban institute and Stadt Köln) to present an overview of all the ambitious activities planned to take place in the Stegerwald settlement, as well as framing it in the context of the GrowSmarter project as a whole.

One of the videos, produced by the event organiser RheinEnergie explains all the different energy measures in an amusing way. Take a look, it’s worth it! The event was also documented by Community Reporters / Stadt Köln who produced a video in German as well as one with English subtitles.


Local newspapers were present and reported about the event:

• Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger
• Kölner Wochenspiegel

What’s next?
To provide a continuous flow of, and access to, information the GrowSmarter project, Stadt Köln and the local industry partners will continue to host bi-monthly informational meetings on-site, at the Stegerwaldcafé, to answer any questions and/or gather tenant’s suggestions.


Stegerwaldcafe © Stadt Köln

We are also keen to build up a local group of Community Reporters in the Stegerwald Settlement. We are in contact with local youth groups and elderly citizens as we would like to encourage them to document the changes that are happening around them and particularly, though not exclusively, the impact of GrowSmarter.

More information on this can be found:


www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-verwaltung/internationales/europaarbeit/community-reporter-medien-aktiv-mitgestalten
https://communityreporter.net/


Action area 2: Integrated infrastructures
Cracking open data - stimulating local entrepreneurs & traffic management
To see all the measures to be implemented, click here.

In our last blog update we introduced our platform, the Cologne Cockpit. At this stage we are very busy gathering data sources to share via this platform and so the interface is still under development. But to give you an idea what we are talking about, our partner ui! – the urban institute developed a mock-up, below:



All further real data will be shared via our open data platform. The lion’s share of the data is government data from the municipality of Cologne, which is gathered and split into 13 different categories, e.g. structural data, geographical information (GIS) or environmental data. Since open data in Cologne is not only a city-run project other stakeholders can also participate. By the end of 2015 we had seven stakeholders, including the police of Cologne and the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

The idea behind sharing our data in a freely accessible and transparent way is to make it reusable and enable participation and engagement of civil society thereby releasing social and commercial value.

Below are some website user-statistics for 2015:



It is very encouraging that there is an apparent growth and continued interest in open data which shows prevailing mood on this issue. Some 25 Apps have already been developed based on the Cologne open data platform which shows a wide range of different use cases. For example a mobile App which shows the parking capacity in real-time, a game to better get to know the Cologne districts, as well as different visualisations.

The City of Cologne has established itself internationally as a known player in the field of OpenData and we are therefore keen to keep making progress in this area, also through the GrowSmarter project, to open up innovation potential by sharing data in this way.

In this blog Solution 8: Big data management Measure 8.1 : Big data platform

Barbara Moehlendick
Site Manager, Cologne

For the previous blog post, click here