Culturally enhanced Smart City Services

Paper
Jens Bley, Germany

Presentation:  Culturally enhanced Smart Cities Services

To “unlock culture for all” is a widely shared vision in the cultural domain. Various stakeholders are in pursuit of enabling citizens to access culture in an active, participatory and non-discriminatory way. In this new context, recipients, producers and disseminators of cultural content are cultural agents in a cultural network. But how can these diverse stakeholders cooperate from a municipal, cultural and commercial point of view? This presentation will highlight initiatives that build upon and contribute to Open Data models for the interaction and participation in the local, regional, inter-regional and pan-european discourse of cultural content. A special focus will be on the integration of cultural content into smart cities services, especially for tourists and citizens.

 

Potential Workshop:  Smart Cities tourism case: cruise tourism

Cruise ships unload thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of tourists in European destinations, often leaving them limited time to experience the local and regional culture as well as commercial offerings. How can new participatory digital services help cruise tourists to engage in local/regional culture in an entertaining, educational, meaningful way, ideally with associated service and business models for local institutions and businesses? What are the themes and topics that can be interweaved between the various port of calls on a cruise, hence permitting and inspiring interregional storytelling?

 

Jens Bley, Managing Partner, Living Labs Germany

Jens Bley is Managing Partner at Living Labs Germany that engages as co-producer of innovative mobile and web based services in the urban environment, focusing on the private-public domains of mTourism, eCulture and digital mobility. The mission: enabling partners with relevant content and unique services to create value for citizens, tourists as well as other knowledge or service seekers. Living Labs Germany produces the eCulture Dialogue Hamburg and is initiating cooperation partner for the TEDxHamburg conferences.

Jens Bley was co-founder and president of one of the first internet agencies in Germany which he later sold to an US based eBusiness strategy group. Thereafter he was Managing Director of an award winning edutainment company, developing and producing children’s media (television, audio books, print magazine) in cooperation with National Geographic. He has been teaching content business as a visiting professor at the University of the Arts Berlin for almost a decade and holds graduate degrees from the University of Arts Berlin and University of Florida, where he was Fulbright scholar. He is member of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce eBusiness advisory board and the Open Data advisory group.