When nearly 70% of the country’s population is expected to live in cities by 2025, the government faces a serious challenge to fulfill society’s needs and make living convenient for its community. A smart city is then presented as a concept to respond to that rapid change.
Based on Ijltet.org, an international journal website, a smart city is an urban development vision which integrates multiple information and communication technologies (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets. Briefly, the technology is being used to improve society’s livelihood, particularly in relation to the integration of transportation infrastructure, the improvement in safety and security; the environment, education and e-government services.
Three aspects are then required to develop a smart city; hardware, software and brainware. Hardware means the broadband infrastructure, including the cable, optical fiber and wireless network to offer a high connectivity and bandwidth to citizens and organizations located in the city. Software is related to the system, smart devices, sensors and actuators that offer real-time data management, alerts and information processing. Lastly, brainware means human resources who control both aspects and are needed to run the hardware and software.
Qlue MyCity
In the explanation above, the phrase “real-time data management” is mentioned. It requires active participation from society to help the government identify the city’s problems and current situation. At the same time, the government also feels the pressure to respond quickly to solve the problem and manage the system –something that is still lacking in Indonesia.
Qlue MyCity from Qlue is then presented to be a solution to bridge that problem. It allows society to report the city’s problems through the Smart City application. In real time the report is turned into data and is being analyzed in the Smart Governance Dashboard, which then distributes it to the authorities. Through its collaboration with Greenpeace Indonesia, Qlue My City also enables the government to control the environment, through the air, light, water and other elements.
Meanwhile, the Smart Mobility and Smart Safety feature help the government to track the traffic condition and enable facilities such as finding a car or person, through monitoring via CCTV, which is installed in a number of streets. Lastly, the Smart Media Analysis feature provides data on certain topics, as well as popularity and sentiment analysis, from hundreds of social media and online media.
How Qiscus Helps Qlue in Qlue MyCity Platform
In Qlue MyCity platform, the communication that is created is not one-sided, but two-sided between the government and society. After the society reports its finding or complaint, the government can give an instant response to the chat application that Qiscus creates, to support the Smart City apps. The chat app is expected to be launched officially in April 2018.
To create the chat feature that is embedded in the Smart City apps, Qiscus provides Qiscus Chat SDK (software development kit). Simply, it is a developer kit used by developers to create a system or any software application. By using a third-party service like Qiscus to create the chat platform, the enterprise like Qlue can focus solely on its business.
Meanwhile, Qiscus will provide convenience for the enterprise, by building the in-app chat that can be customized by the client, and also by providing the hands-on support to run the chat apps seamlessly. The business no longer needs to be dizzy taking care of creating the code in chat apps, Qiscus will provide a real-time communication to you. The chat apps are also powered by the ability to share different types of files, including the audio, images, PDF files location, contact, etc to make it fit with the needs of today’s user.
Also read: Learn More About Chat SDK and API
QlueWork
The innovation does not stop there. While Qlue creates Smart City apps to fulfill the good initiatives embedded in the Qlue MyCity platform for municipal government cities, Qlue also sees the need for organizations and corporations to improve its function. Hence, QlueWork is created to target the city element, including the Police Bureau of Indonesia (Polri) which wants to identify the field problem and keep track of its progress in solving crimes.
QlueWork allows the police agent to snap a report to monitor the field problem, in real time, based on the location, status, photo/ video, and timeframe. Again, the live-reported by the police agent is combined with data from numerous social, online media and CCTV, to make it easier for the police bureau to take an instant decision in solving the problem. Here, the CCTV data is again needed since it helps the bureau a lot to track traffic or perhaps, the criminality problem that arises in streets.
How Qiscus Helps Qlue in QlueWork
Qlue sees the importance of chat apps that enable the city element to communicate and coordinate with its peers or home base in an instant. Therefore, Qiscus helps Qlue by providing the in-app chats that can be used to chat between the police peers or chat with its home base. In addition to that, the police agent can also use live streaming, to make it easier for the home base to identify the problems through the shown video and keep track of its progress solving situations. This platform is available on Android, iOS, and website.
Further Development of Smart City Concept
While these good initiatives are still fairly new to being adopted in Indonesia, some time is needed to make society technology-friendly and able to engage well with the government through this kind of technology. Not only will this happen in big cities, we expect that slowly but surely, the society in other cities or even rural areas will become more familiar with participating and engaging with the government, to report and solve the city problems.
Then, the relationship between the government and society becomes equal. The government is not the leader who manages and organizes strong collaboration between the government and other stakeholders (Torfing et al. 2012), but the citizen can be involved more in the decision-making process.
As Muligan (2013) said, “A smart city, therefore, starts with smart citizens who are asked their opinions and engaged in the process of deciding how they are used.”
