Before a city can successfully plan a smart city project, it must gather key information, including:
- Customer needs and use cases - What do internal departments need most? What do citizens want most? Which challenges are most pressing? Which projects should the city prioritize first?
- Stakeholder ecosystem – all the groups and individuals who will be affected during and after the project.
- Assets – all the things the city can bring to the project, such as data, telecommunications (e.g. dark fiber), real estate (e.g. rooftops, vacant lots, parking structures, “vertical real estate” (e.g. light poles for mounting sensors) and cell nodes), computing resources, and more.
Activator’s Discover functionality answers those needs with robust data intake functions.
- Structured data intake. Activator Discover provides a way to get essential information into a central, standardized, structured format. Although it can accept unstructured text, Discover has many structured options such as drop-down lists, check boxes, radio buttons, sliding scales, and more. T
- Improved data collection management. Activator is best designed for a group of authenticated respondents where you are looking for accurate, timely answers and not just polling large numbers.
- Accountability. Activator Discover's data collection leads to understandable dashboards, both as to answers and who is answering and when.
Who is using Activator Discover today?
- The Smart Cities Council uses Activator Discover for its annual Readiness Challenge competition. Entrants fill in an application form hosted in Activator. As they progress, the Council can see exactly how far each city has gotten so far. If an entrant seems to be “stuck,” the Council can reach out with advice and encouragement. To score each entry, judges use a simple slider, similar to rating a product on Amazon.
- Virginia's Chief Data Officer is using Activator to roll out a new statewide data governance policy. These new rules and procedures will apply to the state’s 63 agencies plus hundreds of towns, cities, counties, and universities. Virginia is creating custom intake forms to learn what those stakeholders want to accomplish. It is also building dashboards to track the uptake of this new statewide policy
- WeGO, a global nonprofit based in Seoul, Korea is using Activator Discover to produce its global smart city awards program. There are six categories and entrants input information about their projects, which are then evaluated online by a global experts serving as judges.
