Day 5: Approaches to Synchronizing the City – IBM Smarter Cities & Dom.Dvor.Dorogi

To contrast the top-down and bottom-up approaches for synchronizing civic activity in Moscow, we brought Andrey Tikhonov from IBM Smarter Cities initiative in Moscow together for a conversation with the team behind Dom.Dvor.Dorogi. Where the Smart Cities approach is about implementing a top-down model of city modeling, monitoring, and control, Dom.Dvor.Dorogi is an example of a rich layer of bottom-up tactics in Moscow that interface citizens with city agencies in a coordinated, collective effort to affect change.

Dom.Dvor.Dorogi won funding through Teplitsa‘s social project incubation competition called Test Camp. Teplitsa  also supports non-profits and NGOs looking for technology solutions for content and constituent relationship management. The organization also gains a significant portion of its funding from USAID.

Our guests were introduced and offered comments on the projects in development. After our guests left we looked at AngryCitizens.ru, a website that coordinates action around citizen concerns. AngryCitizens.ru is developed by Nashi, the political youth movement. The site is well designed and promises a number of great features. However, it is unclear who runs the site and how active it is. Can the image of a crowdsourcing, civic-solution tool run the risk of spoiling the idea of crowdsourcing for urban change?