“Yes we scan”

Interesting. IBM taking a data crunching approach to figuring out smart cities.

Our goal is to build a Smarter Cities Open Model or public blueprint for a smarter city. Think of it is a kind of kernel of a Smarter City’s operating system, or a first draft of its constitution.

The way we hope to develop this asset is new and different: through multimedia posts from people around the world.

This experiment is now open for creative and strategic thinkers everywhere  — young urban digital natives, IBMers, researchers, educators, experts, entrepreneurs, city officials,  grassroot groups  — to share their ideas and insights on the smarter city they want to live in and help build.

The actual magic that converts the disparate content into a single document is not explained (beyond mentioning the “data mining and pattern recognition that will be applied to all the content to help create an open model”).

It’s a really neat idea, intriguing to see how it works out. I’ll be feeding it a few ideas.