Rules of the road: Standards and MIMs

‘OASC helps cities act with universal knowledge in the interests of societies everywhere.’ Davor Meersman, CEO, OASC

You may want an automated solution for managing municipal waste - or maybe it’s controlling moisture levels in parks. Perhaps it’s better managing the turnaround times for voids in housing management. Well, chances are that there’s a city close by or on the other side of the planet that has already implemented a solution that you like. If only your city could pick up this solution and integrate your data… This core need for interoperability between cities and solutions is the primary reason OASC exists and it is where the # Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) come in.

Recognising that innovations coming from publicly-funded projects usually hit a dead-end soon after the funding stops our founders came together in 2015 to create Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC). What was missing was a market, where solutions could be shared between cities facing similar challenges, but had different cultural, economic, social, and technical structures. An initial group of 30 cities joined the new initiative and, soon afterwards, the movement began to grow - adding more and more members representing a diverse community, with currently more than 150 cities from 31 countries.

OASC embodies a singular, global, demand-side consensus on the minimal common ground for exchanging solutions, services and data between cities. We call this common ground the ‘Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms’ (MIMs). MIMs are used to scale local solutions globally and are adopted by local governments, supported by global institutions, backed by industry, based on open standards, technology agnostic, and universally accessible.

MIMs are catalysts for impact, helping local levels tackle global issues together:

• adopted by local, regional, national, and international governments.

• supported by the United Nations, the European Commission, and the World Economic Forum, and national governments

• based on open standards, technology-agnostic, universally accessible, and cheap to implement.

• backed by industry and part of technology platforms and roadmaps worldwide.

A key element to understanding data is recognising that data exists within international frameworks. MIMs have been designed to enable accessibility to data and its use irrespective of where it comes from. Like a superhighway, MIMs create the conditions in which data can be understood from one context to another - to be consumed by tools and applications implemented anywhere else - as long as the data is MIMs-compliant. In basic terms, it means that a cool application (smart route planning models for urban services, let’s say) developed in Brisbane can pick up a MIMs-compliant data stream from Antwerp. For Antwerp, the benefit is that the application can be used locally without further customisation - providing the same functionality it did in Brisbane.

Open and agile cities are attuning their data to align with MIMs, not only to use interoperable tools, but so that their data can contribute to a bigger picture: sharing data with cities right across the globe, using cloud-based services. MIMs are a necessary precondition for scaling up data from city to city, or from region to region, and for genuine replicability and interoperability of solutions.