The National Institute of Standards and Technology will be holding a “tech jam” for their Global City Teams Challenge on March 22-23, 2016 at their Gaithersburg, Maryland campus. The two day tech jam brings together cities and innovators pursuing smart city technologies that provide measurable benefits to residents in areas ranging from community resilience to sustainable energy management to mass transit improvement. The goal of the 2016 Global City Teams Challenge is to help communities and businesses connect to improve resource management and quality of life by using effective networking of computer systems and physical devices, often called the Internet of Things (IoT) or cyber-physical systems. The 2016 Global City Teams Challenge aims to demonstrate measurable benefits to the cities and communities through smart city solutions that can be replicated and deployed in as many cities as possible.

Participants in the tech jam will be able to:

• Discuss emerging smart city plans being developed by the initial set of 2016 Challenge teams
• Join existing or newly-forming teams
• Propose new teams and identify new participants
• Meet smart city innovators from industry and academia as well as city planners and project managers
• Share ideas for innovative IoT-enabled smart city solutions and successful business models that enable all stakeholders to participate and collaborate with each other to grow the market.

To support the Challenge, NIST has teamed with US Ignite, a nonprofit organization focused on the creation of next-generation Internet applications that provide transformative public benefit. Partners in the challenge will include the National Science Foundation; the International Trade Administration; the U.S. Departments of Transportation and State; General Services Administration, Census, Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program,; the private sector's IBM, AT&T, and Intel; nonprofits WeGO, FIWARE, the Industrial Internet Consortium, MetroLab Network, R20, and ICMA; and the governments of the Netherlands, Italy, and South Korea. Other participating members include Qualcomm, Bosch, Siemens, CH2HL, Mathworks, Pecan Street Inc., MIT, Vanderbilt, the University of North Texas, Ohio State University, Columbia University, Downtown DC BID, IoT Dev Labs, Inc, National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), and George Mason University.

Over 25 cities from around the world are currently participating.

Those interested in attending the tech jam can find more information here: http://www.nist.gov/cps/gctc-tech-jam-and-iot-enabled-smart-city-framework-workshop.cfm

The results of this team formation and planning phase will be presented at the Global City Teams Challenge Expo in June, 2016 with final results from the deployment phase to be presented at the June, 2017 Expo.