Ruthbea Yesner Clarke is a research director responsible for managing the IDC global Smart Cities Strategies program.  IDC is one of the largest technology research companies in the world.  I met her prior to the Meeting of the Minds conference in San Francisco  (which I could not attend as I had to be back in time to talk about the Sensing City at IceFest).

She believes that right now there are no smart cities, just smart projects.  One of the more forward thinking examples is Boston, where it has an office of New Urban Mechanics.  However this consists of a handful of people  but has received press coverage in the BBC, The Atlantic, Wired,  and the Harvard Business Review to name a few.  The coverage is for a smartphone app called Street Bump that automatically notifies city officials when your car drives over a pothole.

Ruthbea thought that one of the most significant issues with a concept like The Sensing City was how to get different vendors working together in a new model of cooperation/competition.   She believes that companies like IBM, Cisco and Schneider are in it for the long term, and that the IBM project in Rio was a good example of how to create an ecosystem approach to smart cities.

One of her recommendations was to opt for a digital masterplan as a way of formulating the plan for how the Sensing City could be made real.