By Alesha Capone
A Wyndham council strategy which outlines how new technology will help the municipality in the future has been recognised with an international award.
The Wyndham Smart City Strategy 2019-2024, which was released in June, won the ‘Smart Cities Strategy’ category at the Smart Cities Council Australia New Zealand awards ceremony in Sydney last month.
The award recognises government organisations which are guiding smart cities and digital transformation with a strategy driven by liveability, workability and sustainability.
Wyndham council’s strategy was recognised as “a blueprint for the deployment of emerging technology – but one co-designed with the community, innovators, researchers, vendors and local businesses”.
Wyndham’s smart city portfolio holder, Cr Aaron An, said it was “a fantastic honour to be recognised for our achievements and progress”.
“Our community-first approach to using digital technologies is a blueprint for transforming growing communities into modern, smart cities,” he said.
Cr An said the the council’s strategy “also demonstrates and outlines how council will work towards solving challenges such as transport and congestion, our local environment and the use of emerging and smart technology to modernise and improve services such as parking, community engagement, waste collection and infrastructure management.”
“We have already introduced smart technology to improve planning and capital outcomes through virtual reality, make our customer service more accessible through multilingual virtual assistants like Microsoft Translator – and this is just the beginning,” he said.
The strategy lists other smart city technology case studies which have already been rolled out in Wyndham.
These include smart parking (information about parking bay availability); smart sensors (the use of sensors and data analytics are being deployed for purposes such as optimising service delivery in waste collection, predicting drain maintenance requirements and optimising watering schedules for tree management) and digital literacy and inclusion (such as public Wi-Fi, digital training sessions and courses in online safety).
See www.wyndham.vic.gov.au/smart-city-strategy for details.
