The approaches and concepts of the summits are changing to be more creative and attractive and Future Everything Summit is one of the best examples which prove that by including almost everything needed for a better future: Conferences, Workshops, Competitions, Art and Music.
FutureEverything Summit which is an annual festival of art, music and digital culture in Manchester realized with great interest of attendees from different countries on March 19th-24th, 2013 at Four Piccadilly Place, Manchester. The fifth workshop of the CIP ICT PSP – CitySDK (Smart City Service Development Kit) Project, where TAGES and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality are Turkish partners, was also organized within the Future Everything Summit in Manchester and the people had a week full of the contemporary art and exciting and inspirational electronic music events besides the conferences and workshops, especially about the smart cities, open data and digital innovation.
FutureEverything is a digital innovation lab, festival and conference and it successfully implements ideas in digital culture to provide solutions to current and future challenges. FutureEverthing Summit is organized annually and it brings together artists, designers, thinkers, speakers, developers, coders and musicians from around the world. This year’s FutureEverything Summit was organized on March 19th-24th, 2013 and over 600 people attended to the Summit which comprises conferences, workshops and art and music programmes. This combination is exactly the most attractive part of the event and it is one of the best way to see how people from multiple disciplines come & learn together and share & create ideas for the digital world.
During the festival, many awareness raising conference sessions and collaborative workshops on data society, future cities and creative code were realized. One of the most popular sessions was “A new civics for Smart Cities” by Anthony Townsend who is an urban planner and forecaster and also the Research Director at the Institute for the Future. Townsend put emphasis on the importance of technological, business and political aspects of the smart city and urban technology. After this session and the other conference and workshop sessions on smart city and open data such as “Business of Open Data” by Gavin Starks, CEO of Open Data Institute, “Open Government Partnership and the Global Movement for Open Government Panel” moderated by Simon Burall, Director of Involve, “Policies & Politics of Open Data” by moderated Jane Dudman, Editor of Public Leaders Network, and “The Bespoke Smart City” moderated by Nick Johnson, Chairman of Marketing Manchester, the feeling on not being possible a smart city without one of these three elements strengthened once more. A city can’t be smart only with technological developments!
“Ideas are Theft” with its different format is the most attractive and enjoyable workshop in the Summit. The panel was realized in an underground pub and the panelist were artists, creators, thinkers and designers. The panelists had only one minute to attract the audiences with their words for each question on the value of the ideas and the audiences were able to interrupt the panelists when they didn’t like the opinions or wanted to say something on them. The main subject of the panel was about stealing ideas and how the ownership of an idea can be. Do you think that a person or a company can be the only owner of an idea that they claimed that they found? If we go deeper, an idea is generated in terms of the other ideas belongs to the other people. For example, if a person has an innovative idea or solution for anything, undoubtedly the elements which enable the creation of this idea are also the ideas of other people. This is one of the inferences obtained during the panel!
As being one of the Smart City workshops in the Summit, the CitySDK, which is an ICT PSP Smart City Project funded by European Commission, Workshop was also realized. The CitySDK APIs in participation, tourism and mobility areas which are developed by the CitySDK Project partners were launched during the summit and the applications were developed by using the CitySDK APIs in Routes to the Future: An Innovation Challenge Workshop. The Innovation Challenge was the workshop awaited with great interest especially by the software developers, coders and designers. Nowadays, we have seen that a lot of similar competition events are organized in different cities named such as Hackhaton, Dev-Camps, AppsCompetition, AppChallenge, HackDay, UnConference and so on. The Innovation Challenge in Manchester was one of the well-organized competitions with successful results at the end. It was an intensive 48-hours event with the participation of over 100 people and during the event, the applications were developed by using the real-time data and datasets of Transport for Greater Manchester and CitySDK APIs. The applications were evaluated within six categories; best use of real-time data, best use of multiple datasets, best application created on the CitySDK API, most innovative use of data, best U21 application and Developers’ Prize.
At the end of the workshop, all of the applications developed by the teams were presented and the winners were announced. The application “Go Board” developed by CitySDK APIs won the prize as the best application created on the CitySDK API. Go Board (http://futureeverything.org/ongoing-projects/innovation-challenge/go-board/) is an application which brings together transport information and broadcasting, with community notices, and hyperlocal news to make a service that transport users will want to return to. You can learn about the other interesting and useful winner applications via the link following: http://futureeverything.org/ongoing-projects/innovation-challenge/. In the next autumn 2013, a similar event like innovation challenge will be also organized in Istanbul on transport data of Istanbul, by TAGES and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality who are the CitySDK partners!
The impact of the FutureEverything Summit on the participants is still going on and it definetly expands the people’s horizon who are interested in digital world. Please find more about the summit in the following link:http://futureeverything.org/. Looking forward to meet the interested people in the next FutureEverything Summit in March, 2014!
Aslıhan Kağnıcı, April 17, 2013
