TW: Intelligent City Forum of New Taipei City Creates New Milestone for Intelligent City Development
Intelligent City Forum of New Taipei City took place today. John G. Jung, Chairman and co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), Brenda Halloran, Mayor of the City of Waterloo, and Steve Reneker, Chief Information Officer of the City of Riverside met with New Taipei City Mayor Eric Liluan Chu to share their experience in intelligent and future city development. Waterloo is a city in Ontario, Canada, and was named to the world's top intelligent community for 2007. Riverside is in California and has been named to the ICF's Top Seven Intelligent Communities for three consecutive years. The forum gathers more than 200 local and overseas participants to help develop New Taipei City into a more intelligent city.
The fourth phase of the program has been approved and is expected to be carried out between 2012 and 2016 with a budget of nearly NT$8.5 billion (US$280 million), Chen said at the 45th annual conference of the International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration (ICA), which opened that day in Taipei.
Read more: TW: New e-government scheme to be rolled out over next five years
The initiative was implemented by Research, Development and Evaluation Commission of the Executive Yuan, the government’s executive branch.
Any citizen who has a mobile number will be able to surf the 512K bandwidth internet for free at all government premises where an “iTaiwan” poster is displayed. In addition, those who already have Taipei City’s free WiFi accounts can access iTaiwan hotspots using the same credentials.
Read more: Taiwan launches free WiFi at central govt premises
The City Government has been building mobile Apps for residents and visitors since last year, covering areas such as city administration, transportation and tourism. And now the portal becomes the unified access point for the public to use government open data.
The data sets will be made available in batches. Chang Chia-sheng, Commissioner for IT of Taipei City Government, explains to FutureGov that the selection criteria for the first bath include:
- focus mainly on data which city residents could use
- mainly information that has already been open for citizens to enquire free of charge
- focus on the data sets which have been formatted for easy export.
After that incident Chou, Hsueh-Cheng, Deputy Division Head, from the National Science & Technology Centre for Disaster Reduction (NCDR) in Taiwan, told FutureGov that it made the government re-think of how it would further improve its disaster management strategies.
“After typhoon Morakot, the Government discovered that there is a critical need for an integrated and complete decision support system that would enable central and local government agencies respond efficiently to emergencies and incidents so as to reduce damages and losses caused by natural hazards,” he said.