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Smart Cities Council releases online edition of innovation readiness guide

The new interactive readiness guide will make it easier for cities to explore economic, environmental and social sustainability options.

A popular guide designed to help city managers navigate through smart city technologies is now available online in an interactive web format.

The guide, produced by the Smart Cities Council, was originally released in 2013 as a downloadable PDF, and is reportedly in use “by thousands of cities” around the world — including several in the United States.

“Cities around the world are already using the Readiness Guide to make tremendous progress in achieving economic, environmental and social sustainability,” Jesse Berst, the Smart Cities Council’s chairman, said in a release. “[With the online version], we are pleased to make it easier for cities to navigate.”

The guide, according to the release, is designed for “mayors, city managers, urban planners and staff” and provides those officials with an objective, vendor-neutral look at how they can help cities make decisions about how to use technology to transform a city.

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It’s also been a resource used in the council’s readiness workshops — in person meetings to help officials assess their city’s “readiness to innovate.”

The readiness guide is divided into several different sections that correspond with the council’s smart cities framework — infrastructure, energy, telecommunications, transportation, health and human services, water and wastewater, waste management, public safety and finance.

“[The guide] provides a common vocabulary plus lessons learned from actual smart city installations around the world,” said Grant Ervin, the chief resilience officer for the city of Pittsburgh, in the release.

Contact the reporter who wrote this story at jake.williams@statescoop.com or follow him on Twitter @JakeWilliamsDC.

Jake Williams

Written by Jake Williams

Jake Williams is a Staff Reporter for FedScoop and StateScoop. At StateScoop, he covers the information technology issues and events at state and local governments across the nation. In the past, he has covered the United States Postal Service, the White House, Congress, cabinet-level departments and emerging technologies in the unmanned aircraft systems field for FedScoop. Before FedScoop, Jake was a contributing writer for Campaigns & Elections magazine. He has had work published in the Huffington Post and several regional newspapers and websites in Pennsylvania. A northeastern Pennsylvania native, Jake graduated magna cum laude from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, or IUP, in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in journalism and a minor in political science. At IUP, Jake was the editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, The Penn, and the president of the university chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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