More than 25 new cities from 10 different countries have shown their interest to join the 2nd wave of the Open & Agile Smart Cities Initiative as the deadline to send their applications approached (last Friday, 5th of June 2015). Among them, we can find six Dutch cities from OASC NL –Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Amersfoort and Enschede–, which sent their Letter of Intent on Thursday, 4th of June 2015.
Furthermore, other cities from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Slovenia, France, Estonia or Mexico are also joining the initiative, as well as cities from countries that already participated in the OASC initiative, such as Denmark, Spain, Italy or Brazil. This makes the amount of cities climb up to 50. “Capitals and cities with a population of millions, as well as small- and medium-sized cities are finding their role in this pragmatic network of networks”, said Martin Brynskov, Chair of the Connected Smart Cities Network Board. Also Juanjo Hierro, OASC Task Force member and Chair of the Alliance for IoT Innovation (AIOTI) Working Group on Smart Cities, explains that “the industry is searching for a market that is not restricted to a single city and, at the same time, cities are searching for ways to avoid vendor lock-in and to support local jobs.”
“We have experienced”, Brynskov continues, “a strong interest from cities to join this second wave, actually much stronger than anticipated, so we have decided to reschedule the launch and allow more cities and countries to join.”
The new deadline to sign the OASC Letter of Intent and, thus, to join the 2nd wave is now the 31st of August 2015. In order to allow new country networks which also may be interested to join, there is a new deadline to formally express their interest too. That is the 15th of August 2015.
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