When the people of Kyiv can book a doctor’s appointment, track city budget spending and find the best routes on public transport – all online via free Wi-Fi – they’ll be living in the kind of town envisaged by Kyiv Smart City, a group of volunteers that are trying to transform the Ukraine’s capital into a hi-tech metropolis.
In just a year of its existence, the organization has implemented a range of initiatives in Kyiv, including a pay-pass system for the metro, Wi-Fi in some public areas, electronic boards on bus stops, online petitions, a GPS tracker system for buses on the most popular routes, and so on.
City authorities don’t fund any of these initiatives, but Mayor Vitali Klitschko, who tries to appeal to young people, is a vocal supporter of the project. The funding comes from the sponsors and grants.
“Kyiv will never be modern without the implementation of the kind of know-how that works around the globe,” Klitschko told the Kyiv Post. “Without it, the city won’t develop as quickly as we’d like.”
No renovations
According to Kyiv Smart City coordinator Yaroslava Boyko, the city’s lack of care about its own infrastructure affects the way its residents behave.
“It’s been 25 years since independence, but nobody’s even thought of renovating, say, the curbs,” she told the Kyiv Post. “People automatically dump waste beside a bin. A lot of people think that if the government won’t take care of its property, then they don’t have to either.”
With much of Kyiv’s infrastructure and buildings dating from Soviet times, particularly the period of reconstruction after the World War II, there is a great deal that could be done to upgrade the city. But not much has been achieved: even things like bicycle lanes and free public Wi-Fi access are rare.
Compare that with Estonia, a country with a population half of that of the Ukrainian capital, but which has a countrywide wireless internet network.
Technology to rescue
Still, the country’s growing and fast-moving information technology industry offers the hope of more rapid progress in the future.
Boyko’s opposite number at Kyiv City Administration, Yuriy Nazarov, the head of the city’s information department, also predicts IT will be at the heart of future city development. He wants people to be able to track spending from city budgets and order administrative documents from the government on their smartphones.
“And that will be possible from anywhere, because bus stops and benches will be Wi-Fi hotspots and will be equipped with solar panels for charging gadgets,” Nazarov told the Kyiv Post.
This technology revolution has started in July 2015, when Kyiv Smart City organized Kyiv metro stations to get terminals for paying for a ride with a MasterCard PayPass bank card.
Another project was a platform for online petitions www.petition.kievcity.gov.ua, launched in November 2015.
Then the group launched a free service of SMS notifications about transport schedule changes, with all the major mobile carriers sponsoring the project.
Big data is key
One of the most ambitious projects of Kyiv Smart City has been to open up access to government data. Although Ukraine’s government agencies collect reams of it, the vast majority of the data remain inaccessible to citizens and businesses who could put such information to good use.
The first non-profit technology incubator launched in Ukraine, 1991 Open Data Incubator, is tackling the data access problem together with Kyiv Smart City. The incubator aims to convert the bundles of data produced by Ukraine’s bureaucracy into streamlined flows of information that could be useful to citizens of modern cities.
The incubator is host to a group of programmers from all around Ukraine who are devoting their time to making applications that clearly display government data that is potentially of use to citizens, such as interactive maps of accidents on city roads, city budget spending reports, and maps of most the popular bicycle routes, for example.
All of these little open data startups aim to analyze extremely large data sets computationally, to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially those relating to human behavior and interactions.
1991 Incubator CEO Denys Gursky said a modern city should work just like a private company, optimizing all of its processes – from improving energy efficiency to easing away road-traffic snarls.
“It’s time for cities to use their resources rationally,” Gursky told the Kyiv Post. “Big data is a key to puzzles in many aspects of city life.”
And the country has enough socially active tech specialists to help, he thinks.
“Ukraine has plenty of IT professionals, who earn decent money, but who then come home, look out the window, and see the same old Ukraine,” he said. They understand that there’s only one way they can change the situation through the window – with the help of IT.”
Klitschko agrees: “Let’s face it – we have extremely educated and creative young people.” He added that if the startups are eventually successful, the government would either buy them or help financially.
Another large IT-related project Kyiv Smart City plans to implement is a universal electronic wallet, which will connect the payment systems of the banks together in a network to help citizens pay all of their bills on one site on the internet.
But the main thing is not to make technologies for technology’s sake, Boyko says: “Technologies must serve the people.” But people themselves will have to change their attitudes, she says.
“There are lots of ideas,” she went on. But Kyiv will transform into an up-to-date, tech-savvy metropolis only when “everyone starts behaving like European citizens.”
“Unless Kyivans evolve – become active and aware of their rights – Kyiv won’t be transformed.”
