The summer 2004 Telecities conference kicked off its first full day of activities with a welcome from the mayor of Ronneby, JanAnders Palmqvist. He gave an overview of the history of the town, locally famous as one of Sweden's premiere spa towns of the 19th century. Ronneby went through an iron industry boom in the 20th century, but it soon declined, so the city decided to focus its efforts on establishing the town as a local information technology hub. Despite the recent dot-com bubble burst, the mayor is hopeful that the city will continue to grow as a regional oasis for ICT companies and technology-related higher education. The university, in fact, will begin offering coursework in e-government - the first university in Sweden to do so. The mayor also spoke about the conference facility, a state-of-the-art secondary school that will open to students for the first time this coming August.
The mayor was followed by the president of Telecities. She welcomed representatives from cities that have just joined the organization, a European association of local governments interested in the role of ICTs in their communities. Along with a number of cities from Spain and elsewhere in western Europe, a distinguished group of Eastern European cities have now become members, thanks to the recent expansion of the European Union.
Next, Artur Serra of the Center for Internet Applications in Spain gave a keynote address entitled Open Cities: The Next Generation in Digital Cities. With the rapid deployment of fiber optic networks, cities are quickly gaining access to faster and faster bandwidth. He talked about the expansion of Internet2 across Europe and North America, with networks reaching multi-gigabit speeds. The Global Lambda Internet Facility (www.glif.is), is a prime example - a multi-gigabit network created as a partnership between Canada and Europe, with the network running by way of Iceland. Serra also showed how the city of Barcelona is deploying fiber optic networks to allow for high-quality streaming video.
Serra then talked about the explosion of Wi-Fi: with individuals setting up their own wireless hubs, citizens are now serving as network providers for their local community. He also noted trends in grid computing, in which large banks of computers distributed across the Internet are able to work in sync with each other to tackle complex computing tasks. Grid computing allows anyone with an Internet PC to take part in collective research projects and other activities by providing access to their computer, when they would otherwise sit idle. Additionally, grid computing is embracing open source technology. This, he argued, will make it easier for cities to embrace grid computing and develop locally relevant projects in collaboration with community businesses, research institutions and the public. "Grid cities open the way to real knowledge cities and citizens," he said.
Lastly, Serra discussed the future of digital television and voice-over-IP technology. "The current text based Internet is not for everyone," he said. "The audiovisual Internet can be.... This will be the first Internet for everyone in your cities," regardless of their literacy level. Digital television, he said, will be a tremendous opportunity for transmitting high-quality multimedia services to the home. Universities, in particular, should embrace opportunities to participate in the production of content that can be multicast through digital television. In Barcelona, for example, they are now experimenting with connecting Internet2 networks to digital television.
"Open cities are cities that begin to use the next generation of Internet technology," he said. "The critical point is the alliance between universities and research centers that produce this technology, and the city officers and politicians... to develop more citizen involvement.... The citizens not only want e-government services. They can _change_ governments with the help of digital networks."
Conference organizers then launched a new initiative called E-Citizenship for All, a benchmarking survey on European cities and the accessibility of ICT services to their citizens. (www.telecities.org/ecitizenship) Additionally, cities participating in the project will be eligible for awards based on their deployment of ICT services to their constituents. Richard Drewes of Deloitte and Touche gave an overview of the most recent survey. Members of Telecities are given access to a database of benchmarking statistics from various Telecities member cities; this will allow them to compare programs and services that have been deployed by each city. Users can also search the database by type of initiative or service to see which cities are deploying them, and how they are going about doing it. All the data may be downloaded into Excel files for offline research.