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Partnership Hopes to Streamline Smart City Data Sharing Between Cities, Industry

Smart city accelerator US Ignite and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions are facilitating efforts to work through the barriers to smart city data sharing.

Smart city accelerator US Ignite and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) are partnering on a process that brings together industry and local government to work through data sharing and other challenges related to smart city projects.

The initiative is inviting cities of all sizes and their private-sector counterparts to create a blueprint to accommodate the easy and secure sharing of data.

“We want to identify ways to make it easier for them to share data, to share tools, dashboards, and analysis on top of that,” said Nick Maynard, chief strategy officer for US Ignite, a nonprofit charged with growing smart city projects in communities across the country.

“We don’t want to recreate the open data portals that individual cities have done,” he added. “What we’re trying to do is make it easier for them to share across multiple cities and learn best practices from them.”

ATIS is made up of about 150 member companies working in areas like artificial intelligence, 5G networks and blockchain technology.

“ATIS is bringing the industry folks to the table. US Ignite is bringing several of our cities to the table. So we’re looking at having like five to 10 cities and about 10 to 12 industry partners participate,” Maynard explained.

The cities and industry partners will be announced in the next few weeks.

The cities working with US Ignite and ATIS will help to build a foundation for data sharing by establishing protocols, privacy requirements and data formats.

“ATIS and US Ignite are committed not only to enhancing cities’ ability to solve current data challenges, but to creating a partnership with industry to help cities advance into the future possibilities that secure and effective data sharing will enable,” said Mike Nawrocki, ATIS's vice president for technology and solutions, in a statement.

Skip Descant writes about smart cities, the Internet of Things, transportation and other areas. He spent more than 12 years reporting for daily newspapers in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and California. He lives in downtown Yreka, Calif.