City of Greater Geelong harnesses technology for a clever and creative future

In 2018, Geelong was awarded a grant through Australia’s national Smart Cities and Suburbs Program and we decided to accelerate our urban strategy with an open data portal, the Geelong Data Exchange.

We were looking for a solution that would help it meet four key challenges:

• Provide easy access to public information for residents and businesses. Support the local ecosystem by sharing valuable information and also make it reusable for local businesses.
• Collaborate with regional partners to publish and share data alongside other cities in the area.
• Pilot smart technologies to enable better data driven decisions for our community, such as around parking management, people counting, and hyperlocal weather monitoring.

Based on a close fit with our needs, we chose the Huwise data product marketplace solution, deployed by Huwise partner Peclet Technology as a turnkey smart city project.

As part of the project a range of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have been deployed, covering everything from monitoring real-time parking availability to the temperature and humidity of wildlife habitats. These are managed through the Ubidots platform, which connects with Huwise to share data in real-time.

Users, from citizens to data experts can now create a wide variety of data experiences, with the ability to slice and dice data to quickly make and share their own visualizations in graph, chart or map formats. As well as IoT data, our portal offers geospatial, static and business system information on a range of subjects, from a local residents survey, trees, employment and land use, to city services. Dashboards display real-time people-counts and data about parking and land space usage.

From the outset the portal aimed to engage our wider community, involving them and increasing the sharing and usage of data. Initiatives include:

• The Weather Together project, which recruited volunteers to host weather sensors in their home or workplace. Sensors provide a real-time picture of temperature and weather across the city, while encouraging people to get involved and access the data in their day-to-day lives.
• The Hollow Hunt initiative, part of the city’s focus on urban forest use cases. We began by providing information on all the trees in the city through a dashboard, but have now taken this further, engaging the community through the Hollow Hunt project. This allows anyone to use their smartphone to record a hollow within a tree, fill in a form with its details, take a photo and drop a pin on the map to show its location. This is then recorded in Huwise, verified and made available via the urban forest dashboard.

Implemented by Peclet Technology, the Huwise platform underpins the Geelong Data Exchange. It covers the entire data sharing lifecycle, first ingesting data from multiple sources, including real-time IoT sensors, and then making it available to all audiences to use, whatever their technical skills. A range of tools help create compelling visualizations while collaboration with other councils can be enabled quickly and easily.

The Geelong Data Exchange uses three key Huwise features in particular:

Through the project, we have been able to advance our plans to create a ‘smart’ Greater Geelong, that harnesses data and insight to keep track of the city’s health and the needs of our citizens. A critical part in achieving the community’s clever and creative vision, the portal helps connect technology, data and innovation to create a more liveable, sustainable and thriving Greater Geelong. Through data sharing we are able to demonstrate our progress towards becoming a smart city, involving the community at every step of the way.

The data marketplace also meets the need to lead by example, enabling collaboration with other cities in the region through sharing data and accelerating wider smart city initiatives.

These innovations have been recognised by a number of major awards. In 2020, the Geelong Data Exchange was recognized as an IoT Awards finalist and awarded the Partnership Achievement of the Year in the MAV Technology Awards for Excellence. In 2021, the portal was a finalist in the local government category at the iTnews Benchmark Awards.