Reusing data is key for the future of cities and regions to not only improve policy but also respond to citizen needs and overall improve services for them. However, this is faced with obstacles, in particular a lack of appropriate infrastructure, which is often costly. In this workshop we’ll present Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) – a free, open-source stack to experiment with data. Join us to learn more about the BDTI community and kickstart your data analytics journey!
- Territorial | Urban | Rural | Local and regional | National | EU/ European | Energy | Climate and environment | Mobility and Transport | Governance and Public administration | Health | Tourism and Heritage | Digital and ICT
- Code: 11WS23339
Practical information
- When
-
Wed 11/10/2023, 09:30 - 10:30 CET
- Type of partnership
- NONE
- Format
- Workshop
- Theme
-
Promoting social innovation
- Language
- English
Partner
Reporting
Session summary
In this workshop “Empowering regions and cities to reuse data for innovation with the Big Data Test Infrastructure”, we discussed the importance of the use of data for cities and regions to improve policies and services while answering the needs of citizens. In this context, we presented the Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI), a free, open-source stack that can help public administrations experiment with open-source tools and foster the re-use of public sector data. During the workshop, using a survey, we learned more about the participants and the challenges they face when it comes to leveraging data.
Out of 26 participants, 14 are working in the public administration/policymaking sector (54%). The rest of the participants mainly work in the advisory and urban planning sectors.
The biggest challenges that the workshop’s respondents face in their work are:
- Lack of knowledge or expertise
- Lack of resources or costs
- Lack of data
- Old data architectures
Regarding the topics that respondents deal with in their work, they span from good visuals, decision-making, the digital economy for SMEs, social innovation, connecting road data with public transport data, quantifying carbon impact, and using data in strategic planning.
When asked which questions could be addressed with data, the audience shared the following issues:
- Understanding local retail dynamics
- How to plan intermodal traffic
- How much CO2 is there in an area, and what are the causes
- Where more schools could be built considering air quality
- Whether low-traffic neighborhoods help to reduce traffic
- How to facilitate tourists’ mobility
- How to understand the primary areas of interest for tourists
- How to boost social innovations
These questions led to stimulating conversations and drew attention to the importance of building good data use cases, as we concluded by sharing our BDTI Canva (accessible in the resources section of our website), which aims to help you organize your use case. Through this workshop, we also saw that the BDTI can be a useful tool to analyze processes, address specific questions, and overall support decision-makers.
