Meet the Experimenters in Santander

And then there were winners! After a tough evaluation process, we now know the successful applicants of the OrganiCity open call who have been given the chance to develop their work in the city of Santander.

A handful of projects were selected, and thus, will soon start developing solutions to the city challenges discussed in the previous stage of the OrganiCity project, aiming to provide wellness to the city itself and its citizens. These successful applicants were introduced to the citizenship in an event hosted by Santander Municipality and attended by the city Mayor.

The first Santander OrganiCity experiments:

• Team: Fstr          Experiment Title: Commuting Santander

Fstr and their experiment Commuting Santander will try to transform and expand the act of carpooling, from a sporadic way of travelling to a normal way of commuting, by providing an app that will enable commuters to organise their daily trips in a more efficient way. This will allow them to increase their social network, while saving money and energy, and help to mitigate urban mobility problems.

• Team: Nissatech          Experiment Title: My City Beauty

My City Beauty is a proposal by Nissatech, which relates to the ‘environment’ challenge and focuses on providing a way for active, smart citizens to engage more with the city’s environment/nature by co-creating and sharing their awareness with not-so-active citizens.

• Team: CityMakers         Experiment Title: Santander Smart Buddy

Santander Smart Buddy by CityMakers aims to improve Santander neighbourhoods, while contributing to the development of the city as a “smart” tourist destination. CityMakers hope to achieve this by developing a tool that connects visitors to Santander with local citizens. Citizens will be able to make recommendations to tourists and showcase venues and attractions in lesser-known parts of the city via a web application. By doing this, data will also be generated around this new tourism, which will be added to the open datasets of the city. This will result in better services for tourists and more useful information for businesses and city planners.

• Team: EUROB CREATIVE SLNE        Experiment Title: Walks in the City

Walks in the City by EUROB CREATIVE SLNE, presents a twofold objective: keeping seniors healthy and socially active and making cities and neighborhoods more lively. To do so, WalkInCT will challenge seniors to go for a walk through their city and tag their favorite places along the way, create and recommend routes or even invite other walkers to join them, and being awarded points that later will be exchanged into badges. This way, gamification concepts are introduced in the experiment and promote social interaction.

• Team: RISUM Project         Experiment Title: Real-time Information for a Seamless Urban Mobility

Finally, Real-time Information for a Seamless Urban Mobility (RISUM) aims to enhance intermodal transport through the combined use of the public urban transport in the city. This service will provide real-time public transport information under the GTFS standard, making public transit data readily available so developers can consume the data to build applications that simplify navigating transit systems. Therefore, results will provide the foundations of possible future actions in relation to the Urban Mobility Challenge to be addressed in the city.