The Digital Cities Challenge is a tailored programme of coaching and facilitation launched by the European Commission to help cities develop and implement digital policies that can transform day to day life for residents, businesses, workers, and entrepreneurs. With Iasi city, Granada (Spain), L’Aquila (Italy), Patras and Thessaloniki (Greece) and Ventspils (Latvia), have been selected for this program. Those selected will receive specialized consultancy over a 14-18 month period, including:
- Tailored advice and support from high-level experts who will be familiar with the city, its current challenges and future ambitions
- Access to tools allowing them to develop a clear understanding of what stage of digital maturity the city is currently at and where they should be aiming
- Access to unique and innovative training and capacity building sessions for key staff and representatives of the city
- Dialogue with other cities in Europe who have embarked or are in the process of embarking on the same challenge, in order to exchange ideas, experiences and best practices
- Access to European networks and platforms
In this context, on March 22, 2018, Iasi city will organize the first national conference "Smart City”, coordinated by Marius Bostan, former Minister of Communication and Informational Community. The conference will focus on the exchanges between public administration from North East Region in the field, with the participation of Municipalities from entire Romania, SMART solutions developers, SMART project fundraiser and other public institutions etc.
The topics concerned with the conference are:
- Energy infrastructure: energy efficiency, green solutions to produce energy, solutions for intelligent management of energy, smart public lightening;
- Water intelligent management: wireless meters, reducing losses, intelligent pricing, water distribution network interconnecting;
- Intelligent parking, traffic management, reducing traffic times;
- Air monitoring: smart waste management, climate change;
- Intelligent transport systems;
- Communication infrastructure;
- Public safety;
- Smart education and tourism, e-health, smart public administration;
- Smart local business;
- Common databases;
- Public Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi for public transport, schools, public spaces;
- Cybersecurity
2018 will be a new start for Iasi city as a smart city, facing the challenges of the new digital era. For encouraging IT and smart industries development, on 1st February 2018, Iaşi city won the title of “Emerging City of the Year” at CEE Shared Services and Outsourcing Awards held in Warsaw, Poland. Other cities competing for this title in Poland were Debrecen (Hungary), Kaunas (Latvia), Kosice (Slovakia), Ostrava (Cech Republic) and Plovdiv (Bulgaria). More than 300 leaders and stakeholders in the fields attended the 4th edition of this Gala, including around 50 companies interested in IT services development and investment in Central Europe.