City council plugs in to future

Delegates from the Digital Earth summit in Auckland in August. The city wants them to keep coming back. Picture / Greg Bowker

Hosting this year's Digital Earth Summit on Sustainability has put Auckland on the international map in the fast-moving world of geo-spatial technology development, say the summit's supporters.

And a new city council plan is likely to give the city a further high-tech boost.

More than 300 of the world's specialists in fields including digital mapping, geo-informatics and remote sensing attended the August summit.

Web applications such as Google Earth and others that link locations to services have made geo-spatial technologies a hot topic for both researchers and companies.

An architect of the Auckland conference, Auckland City Councillor Richard Simpson, says an immediate benefit of hosting the event has been a commitment from Digital Earth's international governing society to return to the city in 2008 for a follow-up summit.

Simpson is optimistic the summit will become a regular event in Auckland every two years, and he says he wants to build an arts and cultural event around it to complement the "big science issues" on the agenda.

The summit's focus this year was on how technology and data could be used to "achieve sustainability in all sectors of society and the environment" and Simpson says Auckland now needs to improve its own technology if it is to be taken seriously in this area.

"What it's about is how can we make Auckland not the number five city in the world, which it already is on a lifestyle basis through our natural inheritance of a nice harbour and landscape.

"It's trying to get us up to number one - we want to get there by merit on the fact that we are a sustainable city."

Simpson says Auckland has been slow to adopt broadband, but he hopes a new city council plan will change that.

The council last month committed $450,000 this financial year and $600,000 in subsequent years to a Digital Auckland strategy aimed at promoting technology infrastructure projects.

The money will support the development of businesses cases for broadband infrastructure projects such as a wi-fi network in the central business district, laying fibre-optic ducting during roading projects in the city and developing a "geo-referenced" internet portal to give location-based council information and services.

The council is compiling a list of business and community leaders for a taskforce to help drive the Digital Auckland strategy.

"We've opened the office, now we're in the process of working through the appointment of people for this role," Simpson says.

The $600,000 annual budget will not fund projects directly, but will provide the facilitation and championing of the "greater plan" Auckland needs to attract new business, he says.

The council said in August that it believed a council-owned, open access wi-fi service in the central city area could be operating within six months of a proposal being developed.

The council's goal is for most Aucklanders to have access to fast broadband by September 1, 2010.

Simpson said the date was significant because it was one month before local authority elections meaning it "put a gun to the head of the council to get it done".

His vision for the council's geo-referenced web portal includes developing a site that pulls together local authority information, and data from other sources to give a full range of location-based services.

Calorie maps which calculated the energy used for trips using different forms of transport were one service the site could offer, enabling residents to put sustainability issues relating to their travel into context. Splogs - or spatial blogs - were another.

Blog entries on a specific location such as a local historic building, park or other piece of real estate, would be an invaluable tool for groups such as heritage societies, Simpson says.

Digital city

Auckland City Council has budgeted $450,000 this year and $600,000 annually from next year to support the development of business cases for projects including:

* A wi-fi (wireless) project focused on the CBD and CBD fringe

* A MUSH network (connecting municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals, focused on the CBD and isthmus)

* Laying council ducting when doing road works.

* Micro-technology to deploy fibre networks

* A council portal with geo-referenced digital information about the city.