After the signature of the partnership between FIWARE and GCTC, the Global City Teams Challenge promoted by NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies, it is now time to join GCTC teams and expand FIWARE-based solutions worldwide.

The GCTC Tech Jam, organized by NIST and US Ignite on March 22-23 at NIST premises near Washington D.C., provides an opportunity to present project ideas and form global teams. The FIWARE delegation led by FIWARE Mundus is composed of representatives from European start-ups and European cities, and will be supported by Engineering, one of the FIWARE Industry Group members and one of the founders of the FIWARE Foundation. The objective of the event is to present FIWARE-based solutions ready to be adopted by European cities and join forces with US organizations and cities to strengthen such international cooperation.

In a nutshell:

• Engineering and the City of Genoa, Italy, will present their idea to develop and deploy solutions around the prevention of environmental disasters in the city through data mining;
• TeamDev and the City of Perugia, Italy, are focusing on the creation of a “situation room” to deal with the many challenges that cities are facing, including but not limited to emergency situations;
• The City of Valencia, Spain, will support three initiatives to enhance the city operations. Along with Prodevelop, they will present a solution around the monitoring and promotion of city events. In addition, the city will encourage project ideas related to the creation of a smart city card access by smartphones and wearables with Pay[in], and solutions for smart parking with the SME Visiona;
• Hostabee and the City of Saint-Quentin, France, will look at sharing solutions to better manage urban green spaces in cities;
• And last but not least, Ubiwhere and the City of Porto will present a low cost solution to monitor environmental metrics to better define dynamic urban policies.

Besides these European cities, the City of Portland in Oregon, USA, has also decided to join the FIWARE Community through the collaboration with Ubiwhere and URBI, another FIWARE success story start-up, towards developing common solutions for smart transport mobility. Such achievement has been possible to the FIWARE Mundus’ partner in Portland, Urban Systems.

Additional FIWARE-related start-ups (Breeze and Urban Logistics, both from Germany) have shown interest but cannot attend this time. Still it is likely that they will join GCTC teams in the near future as well, thus increasing the overall usage of FIWARE in the USA and beyond.

In addition, FIWARE representatives will also participate in the IoT-enabled smart city framework on March 24-25, further to FIWARE’s involvement in the related international working group.