Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) is now scouting operational digital solutions that mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on our health care systems, the economy and society as a whole. The solutions will be showcased in the brand-new OASC Catalogue where cities & communities can discover and reuse them.

Submit Your Solution

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on modern society is unprecedented. While healthcare systems are overwhelmed and economic and societal activities have ground to an abrupt halt, cities & local communities must immediately respond to cushion the negative impacts of the COVID-19 crisis and ensure their inhabitants’ well-being. 

Sharing is Caring: Solutions to Mitigate Impact of COVID-19
Cities and local governments are key to solving short and long-term challenges caused by COVID-19. To support cities & communities, OASC is calling for operational solutions based on the minimal interoperability approach that can scale easily and quickly to other cities and regions in the world. 

“The minimal common ground between member cities and providers offers an opportunity to share and scale-up solutions between and across cities, communities and regions”, says Davor Meersman, CEO, Open & Agile Smart Cities. “This interoperable basis allows us to rapidly turn best practices from one place into actual deployments and actionable knowledge for others, in the interest of saving lives in these critical times.”

OASC is now scouting for digital solutions such as data sharing and digital platforms that support cities & communities to:

• share, integrate, visualise & analyse relevant data to tackle the spread of COVID-19
• offer citizens a digital platform to help each other and to connect to neighbours in need.
• mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis.
• restore social activities and keep communal work and cohesion alive.
• manage, track or distribute vital human, medical, technical and other resources

If your municipality or company has implemented a solution that is already operating successfully, submit it here:

Submit Your Solution

This call to action also encourages you to submit ideas for joint projects to implement solutions tackling COVID-19 challenges based on the OASC Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms.

Brussels Region: Connecting & Informing Citizens 
“In times when cities need to react fast, simple solutions that scale rapidly are needed to respond to a crisis like the corona pandemic,” said Celine Vanderborght, Smart City Manager, Brussels Region. “In Brussels, our priority was to show citizens and the self-employed the fastest way to the various online services, the Brussels-Capital Region set up years ago. On the official portal for the Brussels-Capital Region, a direct access page was created at the earliest stages of the lockdown period, with online listings for the main public services easily accessible from home. On top of that, this page lists all public and citizen initiatives. Worth mentioning is the website Brussels Helps which collects all requests for help or assistance within the Brussels-Capital Region.”

Bringing Brusselers together, the deployment of the ImpactDays platform is an initiative by VGC and supported by the Brussels Regional Informatics Centre. The platform offers the functionality to manage and match urgent aid and neighbourly help requests with organisation and citizens who can respond. The system offers cities an administration back-office features to centralize and manage all help requests and offers, measure impact, and to match help requests and offers in a discreet and privacy-conscious manner.

In just three weeks the system has been adopted in over 280 cities, with more than 30,000 helping hands managed. Over half the cities in Belgium are already on board, with the system having originated in that country.

Data Integration & Visualisation: The Veneto Approach
In times when data-based and pro-active policy-making is most needed, the inability to share, integrate and analyse data sources across cities, regions and nation-states is measured in the loss of human lives.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Veneto region, with its world-famous capital Venice, has been pioneering a set of combined efforts with a focus on enabling seamless data sharing. Providing data about infections in real-time has considerably reduced the burden on the health care system in the region and has slowed down the spread of COVID-19.

The real-time data-driven decision support system DE4Bios is used by 5.000 doctors and the regional task force of Veneto: The platform applies open standards and APIs to connect to any legacy systems, integrate and analyse data to support evidence-based decision making. It can easily link to any legacy platform and ongoing local, national and international initiatives.

Martin Brynskov, Chair of Open & Agile Smart Cities, said: “Data Governance and data interoperability is crucial to respond fast and pro-actively to a pandemic. The corona crisis is clearly demonstrating the acute necessity for agile data sharing – with trust and across organisations and borders.”

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For more information please contact:

Lea Hemetsberger
Communications & Project Manager
lea@oascities.org