A smart city and responsive governance report for the German government

I’m super excited to be commissioned to co-auther a chapter for a report for [WBGU](http://www.wbgu.de/ueber-uns/auftrag/), the German government’s Advisory Council on Global Change, with [Dr. Christoph Bieber](https://internetundpolitik.wordpress.com/).

We’ll be taking a close look at “smart cities” and their implications for governance and citizen empowerment. Christoph is professor for ethics in political management and governance at University of Duisburg-Essen’s School of Governance and a dear old friend, so we’ll focus on empowerment, responsive governance and sustainability.

This also seemed like a good opportunity to start a little repository of literature and research in the field for – at least – the time of the project. It’s a backend for our work more than anything, but we figured it might be useful for some folks out there. It’s called [DataCities](http://datacities.tumblr.com/).

I’m super excited about this for several reasons. For me this comes full circle after I co-founded Cognitive Cities Conference 4-5 years ago, and is a great opportunity to get back up to speed on the current state of research and debate, and take a critical look at how we can leverage urban connectivity and technology not to sell IT infrastructure but to empower citizens.