Putting The Citizen First: Blockpass ID Lab Awarded Two Citizen-focused Smart City Research…

In the past few months, the Blockpass ID Lab at Edinburgh Napier University has been awarded research funding for two smart city projects…

Putting The Citizen First: Blockpass ID Lab Awarded Two Citizen-focused Smart City Research Projects

In the past few months, the Blockpass ID Lab at Edinburgh Napier University has been awarded research funding for two smart city projects, and most importantly they put citizen at the centre.

The work at Edinburgh Napier has a long track record of putting the citizen at the core of the design of public sector systems. This includes the creation of the Symphonic Software spin-out. The research work started over a decade ago and aimed to create systems which promoted the rights of the citizen to the ownership and control their data. In fact Symphonic have been so successful and was recently aquired by Ping Identity.

First we received funding under Horizon 2020 as part of DT-GOVERNANCE-05–2020 for:

GLASS — SinGLe sign-on eGovernAnce paradigm based on a distributed file exchange network for Security, transparency, cost effectiveness and truSt

A key focus of GLASS is on trust, security, reproducibility and value generation for all stakeholders:

The GLASS framework aims to build strong business cases and a sustainabilty order, in order to integrate into every part of e-Governance systems:

GLASS thus aims to create new models for digital governance, and which supports the integration of targeted, engaging and effective policies for the citizen. This will focus a range of key technologies including Distributed Ledgers, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, AIBots and NetApps technologies, and aim for a digital-by-default design, and which support interoperable and cross-border integration:

Other partners include: UNISYSTEMS (Luxembourg); Ministry of Digital Governance of Greece; the European Association for e-Identity & Security (EEMA); the Ministry of Justice of Portugal, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality; University of Patras; the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS; Ubitech, PDMFC, SUITE5 Data Intelligence Solutions; and Tages.

For our other new project, we will annouce this soon. It also focuses on the integration of the citizen into a smart city infastructure, and includes a major patnership with BT, and looks closely into the integration of the citizen within a UK city.

Conclusions

I have been to so many conferences where the main agenda item has been the integraton of the citizen, but very little happens. Now the tools are all place … let’s make it happen! GLASS begins in January 2021, and we are so happy to work with European partners, as our lab is truly international in its scope.