Stay Connected“Making Smart Communities that are Accessible, Liveable and Sustainable for All”
The Smart Community Podcast is a hub where Smart and exciting people from all around the world come to discuss all things Smart City, Smart Town, Smart Region – anything that makes a place more liveable. Together we can create the Smart Community Collective.
Disclaimer: All content is representative of personal opinion only and is not associated with any company, organisation or government agency.
Hi #SmartCommunity Friends and welcome to the first new episode of 2023! We hope you enjoyed our summer series sharing some of our favourite episodes over the preview 12-18 months. In today’s episode I have a fantastic conversation with old friend of the show, Dan Barr! Now Dan has been on the show before but it was way back in the early days, in episode 44 in 2018. Dan leads the multi-disciplinary consultancy, Better Cities Group and is a co-founder of the major event planning technology collaboration, Better Events VR. The Better Cities Group specialises in design, economics and engagement and proudly supports clients in the private, public and start-up sectors throughout the APAC region.
In this episode, Dan and I discuss how our thinking has changed on a number of topics since 2018, and how the Smart space in general has matured. We talk about the problem of unintended consequences of technology, and the tension between political ambition and commercial reality in Smart projects. Dan tells us a bit about some projects he’s working on, and he tells us what he thinks will be the big story of the next 10 years in city and urban development. We discuss why we need to get the hierarchy right between people and cars when designing our cities, and the importance of both qualitative and quantitative data, what I like to call the numbers and the stories. We finish our chat talking about the emerging trend of geopolitical factors in the Smart space. As always we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.
Connect with Dan on LinkedIn, via the Better Cities Group website or email danbarr@bettercitiesgroup.com
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
Podcast Production by Perk Digital
Hi #smartcommunity friends! Welcome to the Summer Series here on the Smart Community Podcast. As you know, we’re taking a little break from new content over the Australian summer holidays, and instead we are sharing the replays of a few of our all time favourite episodes. This week we’re sharing my interview with Tim Neale from Episode 308, which was released in August 2022.
Tim, who was named Australian Agricultural Consultant of the year 2018, has over 25 years’ experience across Australia and internationally, 20 of which has been running his own agtech businesses. He is co-founder and Managing Director of DataFarming, a five-year old agtech business out of Queensland.
In this episode, Tim begins by telling us about his background in agtech and current work, his passion for helping farmers to up-skill and use tech to enhance their farming, and Tim tells us what a Smart Community means to him.
Tim then tells us what led him to work in the agtech space, we discuss how technology can help in this space, and Tim tells us a bit about his company DataFarming and what they do. Tim then discusses some of the positive impacts his work has had for his clients, the changes he has seen in the agtech space over time, and we discuss the role of data in the future of the agriculture industry.
We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of tackling data connectivity and data processing sustainably to unlock the possibilities that data can provide.
Tim’s interview is the last in our Summer Series but we will be back next week with a brand new episode and after that we will return to the fortnightly release schedule. We’ve got some great guests lined up in 2023 and of course if you have suggestions of guests or topics, do reach out, we’d love to hear from you. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with Tim via LinkedIn or Twitter
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital
Hi #smartcommunity friends! Welcome back to the Summer Series here on the Smart Community Podcast. As you know, we’re taking a little break from new content over the Australian summer holidays, and instead we are sharing the replays of a few of our all time favourite episodes. This week we’re sharing my conversation with Raymond Sun and Susannah Wilkinson from Episode 276, which was released in February 2022.
Ray is a solicitor at Herbert Smith Freehills, specialising in technology, media and telecommunications and privacy law. Susannah is the Digital Law Lead - Australia & Asia at the same firm, leading the development of Smart Legal Contracts and the provision of digital law solutions in conjunction with the development of the Australian National Blockchain.
We start off by talking about Ray and Susannah’s backgrounds in law and their current work looking at how laws are able to adapt to the new issues of emerging technology. Ray then tells us about his passion for technology and AI, and Susannah, her passion for improving digitised processes and how that involves the law, before they tell us what a Smart Community means to them. We then discuss the importance of data in Smart Communities, the increased use of data and risks associated and therefore the importance of having legal frameworks in place. We then discuss how data leads to Smart Communities and emerging technologies.
Ray and Susannah then share with us a bit about some of the projects they were working on at the time of recording and we finish our chat discussing several emerging trends including; lawyers roles in Smart Communities and forward looking legislation, digital twin representation and accountability in the ‘real world’, more flexible and adaptable infrastructure projects, shifts in privacy laws and finally digital identity.
We will be sure to get Ray and Susannah back on the show in future for a full update about what they’ve been up to since we recorded this episode and how our thinking has progressed since our conversation. But in the meantime, as always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with Susannah via HSF Digital Law Group Website
Connect with Raymond via LinkedIn
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital
Hi #smartcommunity friends! Welcome back to the Summer Series here on the Smart Community Podcast. As you know, we’re taking a little break from new content over the Australian summer holidays, and instead we are sharing the replays of a few of our all time favourite episodes. This week we’re sharing my interview with Laila Al Hadhrami from Episode 263, which was released in November 2021.
At the time of recording, Laila was the Smart Cities Development Manager at the National Energy Centre in Oman and ready to talk about her favourite topic, Smart Cities. Laila begins by telling us about her background and her passion for the digital world and Smart Cities, how sustainability drew her into the Smart Communities space and we discuss the importance of knowledge sharing in Smart Communities.
Laila then shares with us how she is working to build Smart Communities in Oman, what a Smart Community is to her and we discuss the importance of investing in people’s skills and empowering people. Laila then tells us about her work leading Smart City projects at the National Energy Centre, before she discusses how Oman has embraced the Smart Community concept and its evolution over the last 5 years.
We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of serving the basic needs first in communities before looking to the future, and the changes the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to our working and online learning lives.
We will be sure to get Laila back on the show in future for a full update about what she has been up to since we recorded this episode and how our thinking has progressed since our conversation. But in the meantime, as always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with Laila via LinkedIn
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital
Hi #smartcommunity friends! Welcome to the Summer Series here on the Smart Community Podcast. As you know, we’re taking a little break from new content over the Australian summer holidays, and instead we are sharing the replays of a few of our all time favourite episodes. This week we’re sharing my interview with Jess Coldrey, from way back in Episode 258, which was released in October 2021.
In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast I have a fascinating talk with Jess Coldrey about how art can shape the future of Smart Communities. Jess is a human geographer and creative technology artist and through her work, aims to harness the under-utilised potential of infrastructure to address social and environmental needs. Jess tells us about her varied and interesting background, her studies in Visual Arts and Human Geography, her current work and latest venture heading to England to study humanitarian engineering, before telling us about her passion for futurism and how societies progress in a socially different way. Jess and I discuss how her work fits into the Smart Communities space, how she has used her creative and collaborative skills in past projects to bring in new ways of thinking and ideas, how her training has helped give a different perspective and what a Smart Community is to her. Jess then shares with us some of the projects she has been working on as well as some of her achievements before we discuss how art can trigger emotional responses allowing people to think differently and boldly about the future of communities, how art galleries and libraries could potentially be the hub of communities and the value that could bring. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of the post Covid world and the different requirements communities will need in future.
Since we recorded this interview, Jess has been up to a lot! She was named Top 50 Women in Engineering in the UK; she did an art residency in France raising awareness of endometriosis; she obtained her MSc in England as a John Monash Scholar, focusing on drone tree planting; she exhibited a piece in the Tate Britain, which houses the UK's national collection of art; spoke on the radio about inspiring and retaining women in engineering; created a series of 3D scanned postcards to encourage environmental volunteering and recently she’s been to India as a United Nations UNLEASH Global Talent to work in international teams prototyping technological solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals. She’s got some exciting projects on the horizon too, including leading a drone tree planting project with AirSeed/RedCross, responding to landslides and flooding in Lismore here in Australia, and she’s doing an art residency at King's College London Engineering, working with robotics and photography to help shape a creative identity for the new department, and understand 'what inspires us' as engineers to share with the world and encourage others into the profession. We will be sure to get Jess back on the show in future for a full update about what she has been up to since we recorded this episode and how our thinking has progressed since our conversation. But in the meantime, as always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with Jess via LinkedIn
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital
Hi #smartcommunity friends! Welcome to the Summer Series here on the Smart Community Podcast. As you know, we’re taking a little break from new content over the Australian summer holidays, and instead we are sharing the replays of a few of our all time favourite episodes. This week we’re sharing my interview with Katie Patrick, from way back in Episode 234, which was released in June 2021.
Katie is an environmental engineer, software designer, author and co-founder of the two environmental database startups Energy Lollipop and Urban Canopy. In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast we begin our conversation by Katie telling us about her background as an environmental engineer, how she transitioned to running her own publishing company to now her own startups.
Katie then shares with us what a Smart Community is to her and her passion for environmental data. We then talk more about environmental data and how it can help drive change in human behaviour before Katie talks about her interest in behavioural psychology.
Katie then shares with us her two startups and the work they are involved in and we talk about her transition from a more conventional style of work to the startup space, before discussing personality types and the value different personalities can bring to an organisation.
We talk about the basis of Katie's book “How To Save The World'' and how important it was for Katie to deliver her complex messages in the book in a readable way to her audience. We finish our conversation discussing the emerging trends of granular data and data-to-data comparisons.
One recent project of Katie’s that has happened since this interview is the Sustainability Street masterclass she’s been running, which is about how to gamify neighbourhood decarbonisation. We’ll pop a link in the show notes if you want to check that out.
And of course we will be sure to get Katie back on the show in the new year for a full update about what she has been up to since we recorded this episode and how our thinking has progressed since our conversation. But in the meantime, as always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with Katie via LinkedIn Twitter or Instagram
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital
Hi #smartcommunity friends! Welcome to the Summer Series here on the Smart Community Podcast. We’re taking a little break from new content over the Australian summer holidays, and instead we are sharing the replays of a few of our all time favourite episodes. This week we’re sharing my interview with Michael Holmstrom, from way back in episode 201, which was released in November of 2020.
In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, I have a great chat with Michael Holstrom, the CEO of STEM Punks (and that’s STEM as in Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths.) STEM Punks provides immersive STEM programs for students and teachers from grade 1 to 12 and through their programs, enables creative and entrepreneurial thinking to inspire tomorrow's innovators.
In this episode Michael and I discuss his background as an engineer and in technology commercialisation and startup development, as well as what sparked his interest in the Smart Community concept. Michael then explains how STEM Punks came to be and why the real world application of STEM skills is so important, not just learning to code in isolation.
We share our thoughts on buzzwords and acronyms, like STEAM, but why STEM is the foundation. Michael tells us what STEM punks does in both the education and home market and how they’ve shifted in 2020 with COVID accelerating their shift to online delivery. We discuss technology as an enabler for humans, the importance of lifelong learning and the mindset shifts we need in order to think more holistically and change the narrative of what STEM is.
We finish our chat discussing the emerging trend of AI and the ethical and philosophical conversations that are needed now that the technology is here, as well as Michael’s favourite resources.
We will be sure to get Michael back on the show in future for a full update about what he has been up to since we recorded this episode and how our thinking has progressed since our conversation. But in the meantime, as always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with Michael via LinkedIn or at stempunks.com.au
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital.
Hi #smartcommunityfriends! I’m back with another bonus episode of the Smart Community Podcast sharing various guests answers to the question, ‘Where to next with Smart Cities and Communities?” And this time I’m sharing with you the answers from these guests:
Some themes that come through in the guest answers are around making the future better for the humans and the environment, collaborating and integrating across sectors and organisations, and of course using technology intentionally, effectively and responsibly. We have so many tools and technologies now and the Smart City message has come a long way in the industries that are connected to it, but we still have a lot of work to do to make sure we aren’t getting caught up in tech for tech’s sake but making real impact and bringing citizens into the conversation.
There are also so many ways we are still working in silos or getting stuck in pilot mode, so continued collaboration and participation is a must within organisations, between organisations, between the public and private sector, and with the general public as well.
And of course what is the point of any of this Smart Community approach if we aren’t aiming to make the future a better place, more liveable, accessible and sustainable for humans and the planet. Sarah tells us about some of the projects her team is working on in this realm, and Johanna reminds us that the decisions we make now will have ramifications for our children’s children.
As Suzanne says, “It's about ensuring that people are not slaves of the technology, but are making use of it to drive better outcomes, not just for now, but for the future, as well.”
As always we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!
Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital.
Hi #SmartCommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, I have a great chat with Sarah Pink, Founding Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Melbourne. Sarah is a Futures and Design Anthropologist and in this episode she tells us about her background in both anthropology and as a documentary filmmaker, and how that has shaped her career. We then talk about some of the projects Sarah has been working on with the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, including some key insights from some of these projects. Sarah and I discuss why you need to start projects from a place of values and outcomes, rather than starting with the data, and how we can enable people to connect technologies with their human values. Sarah also tells us about a really interesting and powerful approach called ‘Thing Ethnography’ that involves roleplaying people as technology in order to understand what people actually want from their technology, not just what technologists think they want. We finish our chat discussing the problem of Smart City debates being driven by people who don’t understand real life contexts, and why we should be simulating future experiences to get a better understanding of how people behave in order to better plan for the future. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.
Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn or Twitter @pinkydigital
Find out more about the Emerging Technologies Research Lab on the Monash Website or on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
Podcast Production by Perk Digital
Hi #SmartCommunity friends. In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast I have a fascinating chat with Suzanne and Ashish Prabhudesai about the app they created called RemoveAlist, which helps people project manage their house move while also participating in the circular economy and promoting sustainability and waste reduction. We start off talking about what Smart Community means to each of them, and then Suzanne and Ashish tell us how their own house moves and also recent natural disasters in Australia inspired them to create the app, and their tech startup Simply Save Australia. We talk about how harnessing data at the time of moving house can save people money and resources and brain power, the status of the app development itself, and some different use cases they’ve found based on feedback and collaborations. We finish our conversation discussing the need to provide kids the opportunity to move into the Smart space and getting kids involved as active citizens of the future. As always, we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.
Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn and Ashish on LinkedIn
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube
Podcast Production by Perk Digital
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