From Data Centres to Data Forests

City of The Hague, Grow Your Own Cloud
The Netherlands

Contributors & partners:

Have you ever thought about DNA as a data storage device? In fact DNA is the original and most efficient information system known to exist. All of the world's digital files could be stored in just grams of liquid DNA. Less efficient is the enormous energy-consuming data industry that collectively represents 4% of global CO2 emissions.

To combat the problem of 'Data Warming', the municipality of The Hague collaborated with Grow Your Own Cloud to conceptualize the Urban Data Forest. The DNA of plants and trees can possibly store up to 50 times more information than our own, and GYOC has developed a technology that stores data inside the genomes of these organisms. Unlike data centres, plants and trees actually create their own energy, absorb CO2, and provide us with oxygen. Ultimately, the Urban Data Forest could replace unsustainable server farms and reduce CO2 emissions by megatonnes each year. Together with nature, what else can we invent?

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Designing a caring city

Bogotá Mayor's Office, Secretary for Women's Affairs
Republic of Colombia

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Taking care of loved ones usually requires a certain amount of sacrifice. But what if the things you're sacrificing are your own health, income, free time and personal development? In many parts of the world, mostly women are working as full-time unpaid caregivers to their kids, elders or other family members with advanced complications. The care these citizens provide is not recognized as productive and valuable work, leaving them impoverished and unable to earn a living, pursue personal goals, or simply get a few hours off.

In their mission to build a more thriving, equal economy, the city of Bogotá implemented the first city-level care system in Latin America. Through their Care Blocks, Care Buses and Care Home Delivery Service, Bogotá has radically redesigned and reorganized the city to provide services, not only to those who receive care, but also to those who provide care. Thus, allowing caregivers to have more free time for themselves without worry or guilt. On average, caregivers gain around 5 hours of personal time per week. With over 300,000 services already in place, the Bogotá Care System has helped thousands of caregivers to pursue an education, generate income and take care of themselves. The system has also inspired similar initiatives in other cities. What else can happen when we put care at the center of our planning?

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Protecting neurorights before its too late

Government of Chile
Republic of Chile

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In the near future, it might very well be possible to type out an email with your thoughts or gain superhuman memory. These innovations all sound very exciting, but since our brain is such an important part of who we are, the development of neurotechnology creates a lot of new questions and moral dillemas. What do these developments mean for your brain integrity and personal identity? Should governments be in a position to decide who gets brain enhancements, and who doesn't? And how do we deal with the potential danger of manipulation?

With experts sounding the alarm, Chile is pioneering the protection of neurorights. It is the first country in the world that proactively amended its constitution to safeguard the mental privacy, free will and equal treatment of citizens. What else can governments do to protect the mental integrity and sense of self of citizens, as scientific advance opens up a whole new world of possibilities for body enhancement?

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When citizens take care of their community infrastructure

City of Freetown
Republic of Sierra Leone

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Heat is an invisible threat to people's health and safety, and is likely to become more so in the future. Trees can help in cooling down cities, but many treeplanting efforts fail because of the difficulty to grow the plants after they have been seeded. Recognising the threat, Freetown is one of the first African cities in the world to appoint a Chief Heat Officer, and launched a community-driven growing initiative to plant and sustainably grow one million trees.

Through the #FreetownTheTreeTown-campaign, local community members create a unique record of each newly planted tree using a mobile app, and receive small payments for watering, documenting and protecting vulnerable seedlings. This creates new economic opportunities, stimulates community ownership and ensures the survival of humans and nature alike. So far, 560,000 trees have been planted. The community-driven growing model has achieved a survival rate of 82% for newly planted trees, and created new green jobs for over 1,000 citizens, of whom 80% are youths, and 48% women.

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Writing rules as code

Government of France, OpenFisca
French Republic

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Without the advice of experts, new regulations can often be difficult to understand for the people most concerned by them. Legislation uses complex wording and documents tend to only explain the main intent and general use, so citizens need to figure out for themselves how a new policy will impact them personally.

By using OpenFisca, governments from several countries such as France and New Zealand, have published relevant laws for citizens as machine-readable code. A freely accessible application uses this code to run tailor-made simulations that help citizens to assess their entitlement to social benefits. OpenFisca also enables different departments and institutions to collaborate more efficiently on a single model of legislation, and gives them insight into the estimated impact of law reforms. In France, over 2,300 young people use this platform daily. In New Zealand, more than 170,000 citizens used the platform in its first year, and their government is now looking to apply the technology of OpenFisca to all of its citizens big life events. What other social and economical gains can we generate when we turn laws into code?

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Harnessing AI for Collective Creativity

City of Jyväskylä, UrbanistAI
Republic of Finland

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For citizens, taking part in consultations with government officials can be challenging. It is not always easy to translate a wish or a mental image into words. This can create barriers to participation and misunderstandings.

The City of Jyväskylä is using a generative AI platform that allows just about anyone in the city to visualise their ideas and explore possibilities they might not have thought of otherwise. This way, citizens are turned from commentators to contributors. Wishes that might have been difficult to express take concrete form and shape. New urban solutions are explored by enhancing human imagination through artificial intelligence. As new generative artificial intelligence tools become more common, how can governments foster collective imagination?

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Preserving the voice of a nation

Government of Estonia
Republic of Estonia

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What if government services spoke to you in your own dialect? The Estonian government is working towards a future where all government services wil be accessible through a personal virtual assistant. This poses a challenge, since voice recognition software is still optimized for the English language, while it's accuracy for Estonian is still relatively low.

Setting a precedent for involving citizens in the preservation and development of their language, the government launched a new campaign, 'Donate your Speech'. Estonian speakers, including those living abroad, are invited to record their speech so that the software of the virtual assistant can be trained to recognise different regional variations and accents, making it more accurate over time. What other creative ways can governments explore to preserve local identities and a personal touch in the virtual world?

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AI as a common good

Government of Serbia
Republic of Serbia

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The revolutionary power of artificial intelligence is exciting, and the whole world wants to explore it's infinite possibilities. But to access the power of AI, you must be able to afford it. For a lot of potential contributors in Serbia, the large computing infrastructures that support AI-powered innovation are simply too expensive.

Recognizing the enormous potential and necessity of AI, The Government of Serbia adopted a new strategy, and installed a next-gen supercomputer in the City of Kragujevac. The national platform that runs on this new infrastructure can be used by students, scientists and start-ups for the development and application of artificial intelligence, free of charge. The supercomputer allowed over 200 Serbian experts to create new products, services and experiments, without the worry of securing infrastructure. Since 2016, the Serbian ICT-sector has seen its number of employees increase by more than 50%, making it the country's largest net export branch.

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Turning bottlenecks into opportunities

City of Washington DC, PlatformOS
United States of America

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The Department of Buildings in Washington DC was experiencing lengthy turnaround times for construction inspections, which interrupted constructions and cost developers a lot of money. Hiring new qualified inspectors was a slow process that only added to their overheads.

To diminish these expensive delays, the government created an online platform called Tertius that facilitates the onboarding of third party independent inspectors in the local community. The platform uses geolocation to check-in on the hired inspectors, and makes sure all the inspections are carried out properly and on time, with early warning signs resulting in improved building safety. Inspection reports are readily accessible, including previous, pending, and completed inspections, which allows for optimal transparency and accountability. Time from inspection request to completion shrank from as much as four weeks to as little as two days, saving developers thousands. Tertius is now the single platform for tracking all construction inspections in Washington DC. What other processes can we streamline when we invite outside perspectives?

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Edge of Government Award 2023

The Edge of Government Award will be given away at the World Government Summit in Dubai. It will recognise government innovations from around the world according to specific evaluation criteria: novelty, replicability, and impact. The winner of the Award will be chosen from the exhibits that make up the Edge of Government experience at the Summit.

Evaluation process
Applications for the award will be accepted through an online submission process and will be open to local and federal governments from around the world. The filtering process will be done by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation and a leading research partner. The final evaluation will be done by a distinguished judging panel comprising members of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation International Advisory Board as well as well-known innovation experts from leading international organizations and the private sector.

Three criteria are used to evaluate each case study of government innovation:

1. Novelty: considers how significant a departure from current approaches a new solution is, and the extent to which a government innovation relies on new models, new processes, new technology, and new participants to provide its impact

2. Replicability: involves two distinct dimensions: replicability of the problem being addressed (how wide spread is the problem globally), and replicability of the solution (how practical is it to adapt the solution to other countries and geographies)

3. Impact: considers the scope and severity of the pubic problem being addressed by each government innovation, and the extent to which the created solution has improved the circumstances surrounding the problem in question.

Join us at the Edge of Government Award ceremony and celebrate this year's best innovations form around the world!

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