Smart city? Ask your residents first!

A new collaboration between Marketplace.city and Insights.US offers cities an opportunity to brainstorm with residents on smart city solutions

(San Francisco, Tel Aviv, 25 June 2018): As part of a new partnership, Marketplace.city & Insights.US will offer select cities the opportunity to ask residents about the technologies needed to make their city smarter. The AI-powered platform offered by Insights.US will leverage algorithms to extract quality strategic insights, leading to solutions sourced from the Marketplace.city database, which includes validated case studies on diverse topics from localized flooding to autonomous driving to wayfinding kiosks.

The chosen cities will be able to engage their communities around a specific question related to smart cities and draw actionable insights from huge volumes of qualitative input. A call for engagement that would normally result in unmanageable amounts of feedback will instead be easy, efficient and fast.

Insights.US & Marketplace.city hope to involve citizens in the Smart City Movement. “We believe in giving them an active role in designing the future of their cities, instead of the prevalent status of being passive observers, or even unaware”, said Dr. Gal Alon, Founder & CEO of Insights.US. “Civic engagement has proven to be such a tasking effort , no wonder so many cities just avoid it all together. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Local governments should -- and can -- involve residents as they transition into a smart city.”

At the core of this ambitious endeavor lies the idea of closing feedback loops with residents. Insights’ technology allows local-government managers to share the outcomes of their project with their community members in a personal way, tying back every decision or response back to the original comment, through the overarching insight. This three-tiered approach has been found to increase recurring engagement efforts on behalf of the citizens, who feel rewarded by learning about the impact they have made by sharing their advice. They know that their words did not disappear into the void, but have been listened to and acted upon.

“Many residents hear the buzz about ‘Smart Cities’ but don’t have a mechanism to engage and understand the impacts on them,” says Marketplace.city CEO Chris Foreman, “cities will ultimately have an easier time in execution of smart city programs where residents are aware and included.”

About Marketplace.city

Marketplace.city connects governments to technology products and solutions making it easier to find, validate and implement new technology.  Launched from a beta within New York City, Marketplace.city is used by over 60 cities worldwide.   Our mission is to add transparency across markets to ensure cities and residents can benefit for evolving technology solutions in the public sector.  For more information visit https://marketplace.city

About Insights.US

Insights.US solves the pain of civic engagement. Their software harnesses AI & human wisdom to transform tons of inputs into actionable insights into “what works.” It also enables cities to update residents on the personal impact they’ve made by sharing their advice, making everyone part of change. To date, Insisghts.US helped 4 governments and 20+ cities to gain 3,000 insights on 1,000 questions. For more information visit https://www.insights.us

Media Contacts:

Andrew Watkins / Marketplace.city

andrew@marketplace.city / +1-313-737-3891

Christian Davepon / Insights.US

christian@insights.us / +1-202-630-4033