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“Dean of Big Data” Bill Schmarzo: “smart” takes a community :: Cash-strapped cities get help from volunteer coders (Reposted and updated)

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“I love civic tech,” says the data industry’s “Dean of Big Data” Bill Schmarzo, renowned data science and data monetization strategic advisor. He loves it, and he has ideas about how to make it work. It takes more than love to bear fruit.

Civic tech is possibly the most exciting aspect of “smart cities” today. Think of it: Cities want the technology to make them work better, but they have no money. What’s slightly more plentiful are talented young and not so young coders willing to help. Many of them are millennials, and they see a world that needs fixing.… Read the rest ““Dean of Big Data” Bill Schmarzo: “smart” takes a community :: Cash-strapped cities get help from volunteer coders (Reposted and updated)”

Big Smart, Small Smart, smartest

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No sooner had I posted the story in 2017 about Steve Pepple’s real-time visualization of a San Francisco parade’s data than a reader lodged an objection. “Building displays that show where the parties are,” wrote that reader, “could also show a gunman what sites to shoot up.”

True, Pepple’s LCD display, hanging in a neighborhood art project’s entryway for any passerby to see, posed that familiar risk. But let’s not all run away screaming in terror just yet. Pepple’s project — a bit player in the “smart cities” super-genre — deserves a long look at what it and others on the same scale may offer.… Read the rest “Big Smart, Small Smart, smartest”

“Local” is a nonphysical network

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If you were in ancient Rome watching for signs of the empire’s big fall, you wouldn’t look at the headlines. Instead, you’d have to look closely for small signs, faint signals. Big things start small.

That’s roughly what Eric Schnurer argues in “Why Local Innovation Is the Answer,” which is his reaction to a James Fallows article on Rome and the Dark Ages.

Starting with grains of sand

Small things, writes Schnurer, often have “large-scale effects but play out on the level of individual grains of sand.” Those “grains of sand” work in ways unknown or disbelieved by those who believe in “major change and progress coming in large-scale, centralized, and particularly federal efforts.… Read the rest ““Local” is a nonphysical network”