Title slide reading "Playbook Digital City Unit"

ISCN Global Mixer: Knowledge transfer for digital transformation: The Digital City Playbook Leipzig

How to make the comprehensive experiences in smart city development tangible and portable so that others can take them up easily?
In this ISCN Global Mixer, Dr Beate Ginzel and Elisabeth Breitenstein from Leipzig present their Digital Playbook as a living document and invite all of us to be “copycats” in using and remixing the playbook and feeding back into future drafts!

Event details

app digital participation tools digital urban planning management & control tools proximity to the public
Datetime
15.08.2024, 11:00 - 11:30
Event type
Online (virtual)
Participate online
Dokumentation
Download ICS File

Paragraphs

Key takeaways

  • Wikis, codebases - and playbooks! Knowledge from Smart Cities can be shared in many different ways. Playbooks are a format that invites dynamic collaboration and captures many social dimensions of developments next to technical aspects.
  • Your team will go through stages: Likely any municipal team occupied with Smart City development will go through different stages. The model of psychological researcher Bruce Tuckman suggests the stages of "forming, storming, norming and performing".
  • Straightforward writing and genuine reflection: The core "technique" of playbooks remains writing. A down-to-earth way of formulating and reiterating the question about the necessity of each text helps in making the document indeed interactive and vivid.
  • Copycats never arrive at an endpoint: Leipzig openly invites all readers of the playbook to be "copycats", to engage with the material, to remix it, to add discussion points, etc. It's a living document acknowledging that meaningful digitalization has never an ending point but is a constant collaborative journey.

As sort of a present to their 5th anniversary, the Digital City Unit of Leipzig has drafted and published the first version of their Digital City Playbook. And as with many developments and “presents” in smart cities, it has the great characteristic of being non-rivalrous, i.e. it’s not depleted when used but, quite the opposite, even enhanced when shared and modified!

But what is the playbook exactly? It’s an open narration of the comprehensive activities and approaches undertaken by Leipzig for their smart city development with the expressive intention and expectation for the texts and descriptions to be copied, experimented with, adjusted, and reflected on. The playbook's approach to knowledge transfer is thus dynamic and open to change, similar to an open source code platform or a wiki. Reading it, one gets an interesting and indeed vivid impression of Leipzig’s smart city journey. 

The playbook is structured along Tuckman’s stages of group development (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing) which many other municipal teams working on smart cities can e expected to go through as well. It captures the early phases of setting up and structuring teams and strategies for Leipzig and the Digital City Unit up to the current stages of project implementations and reflections thereupon. 

It also features many projects and smart city measures in Leipzig, such as Connected Urban Twins (CUT), sustainable energy positive & zero carbon communities (SPARCS), the ID management system of ID Ideal or the Leipzig City App. 

In a refreshing manner, many of these measures are introduced very straightforwardly, e.g. when giving a breakdown of “Where [and how] Leipzig begins with energetic district concepts” (p. 52ff.) or with the decision tree on establishing a city app (p. 22) with hands-on formulations (“We want to develop a city app!” – “Absolutely”/”At the moment rather not”), thereby showing the interactive potential of such texts.

 

A decision tree for establishing a city app
Screenshot from the Digital Playbook of the city of Leipzig

But see for yourself! 
You can either watch the recording of this ISCN Global Mixer above or dive straight into the playbook itself.
(Currently the published version is only in German, but we will update here as soon as an English version is available.)

 

And check out these other examples of playbooks: 

Playbook Public Service Design by the City Lab Berlin

The Boston Smart City Playbook

UN-Habitat's People-centered Smart Cities Playbooks

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