MetroLab Summit to Feature Metro21 Executive Director

The MetroLab Network Annual Summit in Portland, OR on June 26-28 will feature a roundtable discussion facilitated by Metro21 Executive Director Karen Lightman to discuss sustaining connected communities and a deep dive into the findings from the recent Metro21 workshop with NSF.

To better understand and address issues related to the integration and scaling of smart communities technologies, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Carnegie Mellon University’s Metro21: Smart Cities Institute (Metro21) to host a workshop entitled Enabling and Sustaining Connected Communities Rooted in Solving Societal Challenges. The in-person workshop and pre-workshop virtual listening sessions were designed to elicit feedback and suggestions from experts in academia, government, nonprofits, civic organizations, and industry to identify solutions to the significant technical, policy, and socioeconomic challenges to integration and scaling of connected communities technologies. The findings include feedback from experts in the following domains: mobility/transportation, energy, climate resilience, ecosystem services and multiple applications. The resultant solutions and suggestions are summarized in a soon-to-be released report that will be the highlight of this roundtable discussion, where we'll discuss the opportunities for collaboration.

 Topics for discussion may include:

1. When, where and how best can communities lead in these decisions to better align technology with community needs? How might we create guidelines and best practice documents to inform researcher-community partnerships, as well as the inclusion of human-centered design principles to ensure solutions were useful for communities?
2. What are the challenges to sustaining technology deployments beyond initial pilot projects? How might funders, researchers, and community partners invest in evaluating the effectiveness of technologies and improving technical skills and capacity in community organizations to sustain and expand technology deployments?
3. How might we enable communities to have more (and unbiased) information about technologies that have been tested elsewhere to make decisions about which ones to integrate into their own communities?

Be sure to join the MetroLab Network Annual Summit by registering here.