As is the case every year, our CEO Peter Crombecq presented the Moonshots for Digipolis Antwerp in early January, with great enthusiasm. What is keeping the Digipolis team busy? What are our ambitions? And where would we like to be when Christmas time comes around once again? In a nutshell: building stable, secure, high-performance and future-oriented IT platforms that can handle any digital challenge of the city of Antwerp, even beyond what is currently conceivable.
Back in 2014, our CEO Peter Crombecq already spoke about the 'Coolblue and Spotifysation' of society during his New Year speech for his colleagues, as well as the enormous challenges this would pose for us as the city’s IT partner. After all, imagine the resident at home who thinks it perfectly normal, from the comfort an armchair, to order things, pay for them, and have them delivered the next day; why shouldn’t they expect the same service from the government? Not to mention the extensive personalisation and tailor-made information offered by the world of business.
The city of Antwerp is committed to new digital technologies in order to optimise its services. Blockchain and other distributed ledgers also form part of this process. We have started a number of concrete projects during recent months, within which this technology plays a prominent role. A brief overview ...
The City of Antwerp wants to evolve towards a customised digital service, taking who you are into account, as well as where you are, what you need and when. We need to be able to build future-oriented IT solutions for this in an agile manner. We do this via the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS), a platform which offers micro services and API’s and which allows us to support virtually everything. ACPaaS’ only limitation is the creativity of those deciding to work with it. Sound like a punishment statement?
“Blockchain on the Move” is a blockchain pilot project, supported by the Flemish Government within the Programme for Innovation Procurement (PIP) and is a consortium with the City of Antwerp, Digipolis, the Flemish Government, Informatie Vlaanderen, and V-ICT-OR (the Flemish ICT organisation). The consortium selected the Berlin-based start-up Jolocom via a market consultation as the technical partner for the duration of the first phase of the project, which ran until the end of February 2019.
Faster, cheaper, open, innovative and flexible ICT solutions that enable personalized e-services ... a dream for all municipalities and cities. With the project 'Open City Application Programming Interface' (OCAPI), Digipolis Antwerp and V-ICT-OR try to provide an answer to a pressing need and lay the foundations for the Flemish virtual municipality (VlaVirGem). OCAPI aims at the realization of an Open City Platform that consists of reusable, generic IT components that everyone can use to build their own IT applications. The basis of this is the Antwerp City Platform as a Service or in short ACPaaS.
Antwerp is building technology platforms for the future, that are ready for every digital initiative and far beyond anything we can possibly imagine! How can a local government such as Antwerp respond to all these, almost revolutionary, IT developments that are so typical nowadays?
The opportunities presented by technology are endless. When used in a way that is sustainable and that respects privacy, technological applications can help improve quality of life. This is why the City of Antwerp has joined the European SynchroniCity project. SynchroniCity is a project for smart cities that are looking for IoT solutions to improve urban life. For the City of Antwerp, the focus is on two areas: mobility and the environment.
How can technology improve quality of urban life? The City of Antwerp and R&D firm imec have teamed up to find the answer to this question by running a pilot project in Antwerp’s Sint-Andries district. In early 2018, Sint-Andries will be turned into a Smart Zone and be a kind of technology sandbox where different solutions are trialled and showcased (to the world), while also making the people of Antwerp (even) ‘smarter’.
During the Gartner Symposium ITxpo at the beginning of November, the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS) showed up in a slide with the laudatory caption: Who is leading with digital government technology platforms? It is of course a mention we are proud of, but above all it’s a good reason to once again explain what exactly ACPaaS is and why we chose this architecture.
At the end of October we had Peter Hinssen on our visit to catch up. About our moonshots and about the time that he, as a startup, more than 20 years ago, pioneered us with the first internet kiosks and the intranet of the city of Antwerp. Two weeks after Peter's visit, the column below appeared in De Tijd. Of course this gives us an extra boost but what we also want to say is: a big thank you to the startups with whom we already worked together, and an invitation to everyone else to jump on the cart. The collaboration with start-ups is self-evident to us.
Software development in Antwerp has been experiencing – and continues to do so – a revolutionary transformation. For this we collaborate with creative partners, who just like us believe in a radically different type of software. Software that is not developed in a single piece, but in blocks that can be quickly put together, modified and rebuilt, enabling a quick and flexible response to conditions and allowing the development to be much more cost effective and rapid. And additionally these blocks are reusable. That is the most important aspect.
In the week of 6 March we welcomed 12 companies that came to pitch for the blockchain proof of concepts Course of Life, Deciding, Lifelong Learning and Moving House. A week that was very interesting in the technological and functional spheres, as there were many smart concepts and demos, but also a week in which various governments collaborated in a tremendously flexible and enthusiastic way to prepare and assess the pitches and draw up a shortlist of a number of candidates per POC. The inter-governmental collaboration in this story was worth telling you as it whets the appetite for more :)
Along with a totally new way of developing software, from large, monolithic applications to modular platforms consisting of microservices, there is also a fresh breeze blowing through Digipolis as an organisation. The heart in this story? The Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS). Or how we ensure that Antwerp has future-oriented, flexible as well as time and cost-saving results…
The local government of Antwerp is striving to make personalised digital service and interaction with its citizens, businesses, students and teachers, colleagues… available. No matter who they address, the same principles apply: customer-centric and customised service at any time, any place, and via any device.
At the beginning of this year we, and the city of Antwerp, had the opportunity to sign up for a European proposal for projects that use pre-commercial procurement (PCP).
An agile operation (work in progress ;)) demands an agile technological biotope. We called ours Digipolis Antwerp Application Stack, or DaaS.
Things were moving along quite fast for the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS) in the past few months. While ACPaaS was still a vague concept last year round this time, today there are at least 20 engines of re-usable, modular software components under way.
Good ideas can come from anywhere. So we want to provide everyone the tools to build them! It's our firm belief and conviction that the result of a co-created digital city of Antwerp is much stronger than one built by a few appointed stakeholders.
How can the city re-invent itself as a large-scale Internet of Everything Lab where everyone can build, test and validate their own innovative solutions?
The Antwerp City of Things story is taking the next step forward through implementation of a LoRa (Long Range Low Power) network in the Antwerp city centre.