CONNECTOpen Sourced Smart City Collaborative
Building a network of smart city best practices for the 88 cities in LA County
Please describe your project proposal.
The City of West Hollywood will soon release an RFP for a Smart City Strategic Plan. The plan will aim to solve a number of questions regarding project priorities, funding options, implementation strategy, citizen privacy concerns, and technology best practices. The LA2050 Grant would allow this strategic plan to be open-sourced and serve as a model for other cities, especially small cities, throughout the County, through development of an interactive website and toolkit for other cities.
Which of the CONNECT metrics will your proposal impact?
Access to free wifi
Government responsiveness to residents’ needs
Travel time to work
Public transit riders
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
Westside
County of Los Angeles
City of West Hollywood
Describe in greater detail how your proposal will make LA the best place to CONNECT?
The Open Sourced Smart City Collaborative, led by the City of West Hollywood, would build off the forthcoming West Hollywood Smart City Strategic Plan and create an open sourced toolkit of resources and best practices for all cities in Los Angeles County.
The West Hollywood Smart City Strategic Plan will give the City a roadmap to responsibly and efficiently incorporate smart technologies into City Hall and the urban infrastructure and leverage that technology to improve our citizens' quality of life, provide data to make smart decisions, and create opportunities for attracting and maintaining business.
Most Smart City strategies are tailored for large cities and disregard the opportunities available for smaller cities. With a population under 35,000 and number of new smart technology initiatives underway, including development of a municipal fiber backbone network, acquisition of light standards from Southern California Edison, and a robust smart bus shelter replacement project, the City of West Hollywood lacks a model guiding plan to integrate and streamline its Smart City projects.
We suppose that many of the other cities in Los Angeles County are in the same position as West Hollywood in this regard. While larger cities like Los Angeles and Long Beach are large enough to attract the attention of major Smart City infrastructure providers, smaller cities in the region often get left behind.
This project proposes to develop the West Hollywood Smart City Strategic Plan as an open sourced document from the beginning. The plan would be developed with the other 87 cities in LA County in mind, and would include shareable countywide, regional, state, and national policies, funding mechanisms, and best practices. An interactive, robust website would allow for easy Countywide collaboration and provide a digital toolkit for our fellow LA County Cities. West Hollywood would convene quarterly regional meetings to build the Smart City network across LA County.
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your project.
Success for the Open Sourced Smart City Collaborative will include participation in the collaborative by at least 16 (20%) cities in LA County, 50 downloads of the toolkit, and 2 round table events.
How can the LA2050 community and other stakeholders help your proposal succeed?
Money
Advisors/board members
Publicity/awareness
Community outreach
Network/relationship support