Lab4CITY Istanbul Event was organized on February 26, 2015 in Studio X, Istanbul where TAGES is one of the supporters of the event and Leyla Arsan, CEO of TAGES, is one of the speakers of “Public Transport Loves Open Data” Panel.
Lab4CITY (Lab for Civic Innovation and Technology) is a form which aims to provide a space for bringing together innovative start-ups, entrepreneurs, public transportation authorities, innovation hubs, open data pioneers and policy makers. All this to inspire and showcase how open-data, civic technology and the power of the crowd can help to make better decisions, empower people and improve citizens´ lives.[1] First Lab4CITY event was organized in Berlin in November 2014. And the second event, Lab4CITY Istanbul, was organized on 26th of February 2015 in Studio-X Istanbul by Allryder.
There were 3 panels organized during the event, namely: Public Transport Loves Open Data, Civic Innovation & Technology as the way to smarter cities, and Crowdsourcing the future.
Public Transport Loves Open Data panel was moderated by Arzu Tekir – Executive Director of EMBARQ Turkiye and the speakers were Leyla Arsan – TAGES CEO, Justus Brown – Head of Transit Platform and Content of HERE, Kenan Kılavuz – Manager of Intelligent Transport Systems of IETT, Michael Mulquin – Director of City Building Blocks/ Member of City Protocol Task Force, Ali Rebae – Founder of Data Aurora. Speakers talked about how open data can help public transport and the benefits of this. On her speech Leyla Arsan talked about the completed CitySDK project and its success and she added that public data belongs to the public so it should be open. She by then added the proper ways of making the data open which is to develop a plan for open data first, by looking at the best practices and executing on that. Kenan Kılavuz, only speaker from public sector, also gave good news about IETT’s plans to open their data to the public in the near future.
The event continued with other two great panels through the lively discussions between the speakers and the audiences. The focus of the “Civic Innovation & Technology as the way to smarter cities” panel was to discuss about how innovation and mobility sector is important to be a smart city. The last panel “Crowdsourcing the future” also was very attractive panel where the main motivators of crowdsourcing, how to get people engaged in working towards making cities smarter and the value of this have been discussed.
