San Leandro as a Smart City: Leading on Regional and National Stage!

City of San Leandro staff have been featured as speakers at a number of recent advanced technology conferences, focused on the City’s leadership, accomplishments and aspirations regarding its rapid transformation from a traditional industrial/suburban community to an urban center for innovation. The City shared the stage with City representatives from across the country, including Seattle, San Jose, Philadelphia, County of San Mateo, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Oakland and others, with San Leandro’s transformation and entry into Smart City and Internet of Things technologies characterized as the Little City That Could!

As a result, a number of technology publications have produced some insightful articles — and great press! — for the City of San Leandro.

These conferences included:

• Smart Cities Week Silicon Valley , May 8-10: Focused on the next generation of smart cities, this conference brought together city leaders and technology innovators from around the globe to envision the city of tomorrow.  Mayor Cutter also participated in this prestigious conference, led by the global Smart Cities Council based in Reston, VA.  San Leandro’s CIO shared the City’s accomplishments and vision for a Smart City future in an article published by the conference organizers:

INTERVIEW: Deborah Acosta, Chief Innovation Officer, City of San Leandro

and resulting article about the panel discussion from Jason Shueh of StateScoop

Four Cities Say Connectivity is Key in 2017 Smart City Projects

• Internet of Things World, Santa Clara Convention Center, May 14-17:  TechRepublic’s Teena Maddox moderated a panel at IoT World 2017 that focused on how smart cities incorporate sustainability and IoT. The leaders, which included representatives from the cities of San Leandro and  Oakland, as well as the Lower Colorado River Authority and a private company, ActiveScaler Inc., shared several takeaways for all cities to consider.

5 Lessons from IoT Leaders Creating Sustainable Smart Cities 

• Summit on Government Performance & Innovation, May 24-25: This 3rd annual Summit, sponsored in collaboration with Living Cities , is a one-of-a-kind forum that brings together innovators, change-agents, disrupters, and civic entrepreneurs – and all those interested in making government work better for local communities. San Leandro’s CIO Deborah Acosta participated on a panel with San Francisco’s CIO Jay Nath and Founder and Executive Director of City Innovate Foundation, Kamran Saddique to discuss the involvement and experience of San Leandro and San Francisco with the Startups In Residence Program.  A full feature story regarding this panel and the STIR program will be published in the July/August issue of GovTech print and online magazine.

   Interestingly, GovTech was fascinated with San Leandro’s fiber optic infrastructure, the almost-completed city-wide Smart Lighting project and development of a Fiber Optic Master Plan with particular focus on leveraging the City’s street light poles.  As a result, the following video interview taped at the conference was subsequently published:

Seeing Past Light Poles: Plotting a Smart City Strategy

Last, but not least, we thank Jason Shueh of StateScoop for posting the following comprehensive, San Leandro Smart City Story and the followup story to this post from David Curry at Readwrite:

How the Internet of Things is Transforming Energy, Lighting and Traffic in San Leandro

and

How San Leandro is Using IoT to Transform Itself  

The City of San Leandro’s transformation, guided by the City Council’s vision of San Leandro as a “center for innovation”, has caught the attention of the larger IoT community.  The larger goal, of course, is to ensure that the City “undertakes programs and advance projects promoting sustainable economic development”, improved community services and engagement, reduced service costs and potential new revenues.

The San Leandro community, including residents, business owners and other stakeholders, will soon be invited to participate in creating priorities for the City-owned fibers and potential Smart City technologies that could be deployed on the network.  Stay tuned to San Leandro Next for further developments!