Summer Series: Moving from Smart Cities to Smart Regions, with Jennifer Sanders

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 your all time favourite episodes. This week we're sharing my interview with Jennifer Sanders from Episode 170 which was recorded pre Covid-19 Pandemic, in February of 2020. In this episode of the Smart Community podcast I have a great conversation with Jennifer Sanders, the Co-Founder and Executive Director at the Dallas Innovation Alliance or DIA as she refers to it a lot in this episode. Jennifer tells us about the DIA, how it came to be and the needs-based, neighbourhood-centric approach that they take. We cover the importance of educating and empowering citizens, especially young people and people from underserved neighbourhoods, on how they can engage with their communities and Jennifer shares a great story about the benefits of giving kids a seat at the table when discussing solutions to community problems. We discuss how Dallas is embracing the Smart City concept and the real impacts and benefits of the openness, transparency and knowledge-sharing that goes on between individuals and organisations in the Smart City space. Jennifer tells us about the projects she's working on with the DIA, including their focus on equity, digital inclusion and having a regional focus through the North Texas Innovation Alliance. We have a great chat about how the regional approach is the natural next step from the city-centric focus and how it helps with efficiencies and economies of scale for smaller towns with fewer resources. Now the DIA has dozens of partner organisations from all sectors and Jennifer tells us about how they approach integration and collaboration with so many stakeholders. We finish our chat talking about the emerging trends of data privacy and ownership in public data-driven projects, and we have an interesting chat about telemedicine too. As I mentioned previously, this episode was recorded before Covid-19 brought travel restrictions and lockdowns to the world and so it will be interesting to see what the innovations in that space are once we get through this pandemic. We will be sure to get Jennifer back on the show in future for a full update about what she has been up to and how our thinking has progressed since this 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 Jennifer on LinkedIn or Twitter @dallassmartcity 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.