On August 2nd and 3rd, the Montevideo Smart Cities Meeting will take place in the Conference Center of the Montevideo Municipality, with the participation of international, regional, national and departmental authorities; entrepreneurs; representatives of universities and students; and citizens as well.

These Smart Cities meetings began in 2015, with a first one focused on listening to proposals on the topic of smart cities. The second edition was held in 2016 next to the 6th ITU Green Standards Week, so the event took on an international character. Montevideo hosted various experts on innovation, sustainable development and technology applications.

This year the conferences are coordinated and organised by the Department of Sustainable and Intelligent Development under the tagline “Innovation True Stories”, in order to exchange experiences and knowledge, creating spaces for reflection, and inform the citizens about what a smart, sustainable and inclusive city consists of.

FIWARE will participate within this Smart Cities framework, with the talk “Environmental Observatory Project” on day one; and the “Big Data, Science of Data and New Bounds with Citizenry” panel, on day two.

The Montevideo Municipality is implementing a powered by FIWARE platform, as the basis for its Smart City platform, collecting and managing the use of the city data through the Orion Context Broker, adapting the NGSI FIWARE API as the standard to accede the information in right real-time.

This project is already running, assigned –via public tender– to a consortium of local companies. It includes the infrastructure of the servers and software components of the platform, with apps to manage urban mobility and a series of pilot projects using sensors to control the environmental quality, the city water supply and sanitation.

The afore mentioned infrastructure will be serving as the foundation for a City Government Platform (Plataforma de Gobernanza de la Ciudad – PGC), also based on FIWARE. A two-year project that has just started. It will include systems to monitor and control the public transportation, systems to control the freight transport, the control of the waste-recollection vehicles; monitor the sanitation infrastructure and give early alerts about floods, a system for sound mapping, solar radiation, air quality, etc.

The 3rd Smart Cities Meeting, however, will not be only about Smart Cities, other topics linked to the application of technologies in management issues will be considered. Parallel to the conferences, exchange activities will be developed: workshop for kids (they would imagine the Montevideo of the future); a citizen-oriented Lab around the app ‘Cómo ir’, as an open workshop to contribute with fresh ideas for the new version of the app; and a Women's Desk, where they will work on smart technologies and cities, from an equity and gender perspective.

How to participate? The access is free. There is a registration form available here. If you have any suggestions, the organisation will be glad receiving them. Please write to evento.ci@imm.gub.uy!

Do not forget to download the agenda and check which panels will you be attending. Follow the conversation on Facebook and Twitter to stay informed and share your voice.