Harnessing the Power of Open Source for a Better Future through FIWARE community

That force could be seen clearly in FIWARE summit on 12-13th of June in Vienna, Austria, and as FIWARE declare in their mission “building an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors”.

The Summit brought 420+ participants from around the globe vary from public admins to academia, from startups to global players, from developers to strategist, and from project managers to CEOs.

Open Source for Smart Solutions

Open source platform has become a driving force behind societal progress and technological advancement. Its accessibility, collaborative nature, and capacity for innovation have transformed the way individuals, businesses, and communities harness technology. By embracing open source, society benefits from affordable solutions, increased collaboration, improved security, and the empowerment of local initiatives. There were 160+ speakers, 300+ presentations and 10+ panel discussions during the summit that show many use cases of FIWARE platform in real world applications.

In the beautiful hall of Vienna City Hall many enthusiasts presented their use case and technology platform that was built with open source platform of FIWARE embedded in it. Many interesting topics being presented; Madinah Region Development Authority, Saudi Arabia build their city applications from business sector to tourism with the help of open source platform of FIWARE; city of Herne in Germany also use FIWARE in developing their parking occupancy application, crowd management application, and traffic application; a Digital Twin solution was built to detect air pollutions in real time that can warn citizens and authority if there are accidents happens that can effect health for people surrounding the area. Many applications were built that give good impacts to society directly with the support of open source platform of FIWARE.

Water sector embrace open source

KWR has the opportunity to present the ongoing Data Management Platform project and discussing our goal to become a Data Driven Organization and where FIWARE could be embedded as a choice of open source platform in the tool. Many people found it as a good and ambitious project especially in the era of big data and digital transformation. After the presentation, I have the opportunity to discuss with other people from water sector some interesting topics related with open source and open data in the water sector.

The summit were divided into 5 domains: Smart Cities, Smart Energy, Smart Industry, Smart Agrifood, and Smart Water. One interesting thing that we noticed was that the domain Smart Water has not much enthusiast as the other Smart Domains. Smart Cities especially has a lot of enthusiastic people in the crowd, with many interesting use cases in real world application. There were many public admin from different cities around the globe: from Vienna to China to Madinah in Saudi Arabia.

The discussion then came up to the limited implementation of the use of open source and open data in water sector. This situation happens everywhere and not like other domains where they already embrace the full benefit of open source and open data, water sector still struggling in having common understanding on how important to collaborate in such an open way. Perhaps we can learn from other domains about the benefits of open collaborations and slowly embrace the importance of open source and open data for society in water sector. KWR as the leading water research organization could be a good example of advocating the movement and with FIWARE embed in our Data Platform, it could be a good starting point.