With the aim of boosting the exchange of knowledge and collaboration between cities, and most of all, to focus the work carried out during the committee working meetings, diverse thematic and operative meetings will be organized. These meetings will allow having a “real” exchange and debate through the use of new methodologies such as “Mini BarCamp” that can facilitate the interaction between the participants, but also the identification of collaboration projects.
In order to focus the work developed in the working meetings, each working meeting will be centred in one of the key areas of performance identified during the elaboration of the “Smart Cities Study: International study on the situation of ICT, innovation and Knowledge in cities” and that incorporates a “holistic” vision of Smart City, which brings together 6 key Areas of performance that affect the development of cities: governance, people, mobility, environment and living.
The first working meeting held in May 2013 in Bordeaux was focused on the “Smart Economy” axis and allowed the attendants to share vision and also debate new tendencies on issues related with the creation, attraction and retention of talent, the importance of boosting new merging sectors of activity especially the ones related to the new technologies, innovation and green technologies, the importance of creating and enable infrastructures and spaces for the business development and creativity in order to give support to the entrepreneurship, among others issues.
During meeting, took place an open discussion and exchange of experiences through the « Bar-Camp » – style workshops. This methodology includes the establishment of topics of discussions according to the participant´s interests and the topics of the meeting and then work in small groups that allow:
- Experiences and project sharing
- Identification of possible projects of collaboration.
As a result, 2 collaboration projects were identified: