The Smart City series of lectures span the fundamental ideas, visions and the technologies related to the development of services for the Smart City (or Society) and the Internet of Things. Join us at Goto 10.

What incentives do you have, to allow others use your devices that you’ve invested in to provide data to your systems? Allowing third parties access to your devices places load on them, possibly degrading your own system performance. It also allows your competitors to provide competing services, without having to invest in devices. The lack of incentives to allow others to access devices creates closed verticals, or silos. Competing companies must install duplicate devices doing the same thing, to be able to provide a similar service. This is not smart. Being able to reutilize existing devices for new applications is vital to realizing the Smart City. Apart from avoiding unnecessary spending, it allows for smarter use of existing resources. It also allows cross-domain fertilization, creating new types of opportunities, not in the scope of existing companies.

To provide incentives for device owners to allow access to their devices by third parties, IEEE IoT Harmonization provides a means for owners to publish contracts for their devices. Anyone accepting the conditions gain access to the devices. The infrastructure maintains a record of usage, issues transactions and provides an economic feedback, based on usage, back to the owners of the devices. In this model, it can become lucrative to be a thing o data publisher. Multiple consumers get a natural way to split the costs of common hardware, based on usage. Constrained resources can be naturally divided between consumers.

Participants are welcome to join the Smart City Labs as well, where we will experiment with the concepts presented in the lectures in a practical manner. Do you have things you want to get connected? Please bring them along, and I’ll help you connect them.