Support to PSO's green digitalisation

Somme Numérique (SN) is a Public Service Organisation (PSO) that is regrouping all the municipalities and communities of the french administrative department (province) Somme, part of the Region Hauts-de-France: Its aim is the mutualisation of skills and pooling common services supporting the digital transformation of all the municipalities and communities, especially the rural ones. It is managed by a public governance through a committee made up of elected representatives from the members (municipalities, communities and department).

SN offers its members shared services for the purchase and exploitation of digital services and for the use of information and communication technologies in administration and education, such as administrative dematerialisation (legality control, public procurement, electronic archiving), digital workspaces for e-education, web sites management, social networks,...

In 2023, SN received the mission to extend its services towards "smart and sustainable territories" domain with a focus on supporting the rural areas for environmental protection, energy consumption optimisation, and get prepared for circular economy.

In order to initialise and realise this mission, SN launched an experimental phase based on Internet of Thing technology deployments concretised with a first public successful procurement process attributed at the begin of 2024.

As the challenges of sovereignty, replicability and scalability of the digital solutions to be implemented for the "smart and sustainable territories" services are totally new for SN , they decided to rely on the principles of Living-in.eu declaration that had been recently signed by the Region Hauts-de-France, in the framework of the regional REV3 policy towards a Sustainable and Digital Economy. 
In order to get efficient, independant and local support for their innovative digital project, SN has been introduced to the EDIH GreenPowerIT by the Digital Transformation Mission team of the Region.

To support PSO Somme Numérique (SN), EDIH GreenPowerIT leveraged its connexions and collaborations with global ecosystems related to Smart Cities and Communities, especially Living-in.eu and Open & Agile Smart Cities and Communities and related to open source communities, namely FIWARE.  The first concrete deliverables from "Test Before Invest" services concern the operational interoperable platform based on the Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) to structure the architecture and the open source components from the FIWARE community specifically packaged following the European Data Space for Smart Communities blueprint. Thanks to this practical knowledge and mutualised resources from the EDIH, SN deployed a first operational interoperable digital platform in march 2024 and 10 pilot local communities got engaged to prioritise and precise the use cases. These pilot communities identified 4 priority related to sustainability and efficiency:

• Energy optimisation in the public buildings, starting with heating systems contol

• Natural water courses monitoring , starting with natural area protection and flood prevention

• Decentralised recyclable waste container park monitoring, starting with usage control and waste collection optimisation

• Street lighting monitoring

With the support of the EDIH GreenPowerIT and of a local SME, SN has prototyped the expected services and made them available for the pilot communities in june 2024.

In addition to this technical support, EDIH GreenPowerIT also delivered "support to find investments" services by helping SN to successfully apply to the H2020 project dRural Open Call and received "cascade funding" to accelerate the development and delivery of the new services to the rural communities.

To consolidate the quality of the technical open source deliverables and share experience and knowledge with other PSOs, EDIH ("networking" services) also connected SN with French cities and Communities having similar needs and approach

As a PSO mutualising digital services for rural communities, Somme Numérique (SN) got concrete support from the regional EDIH for addressing their immediate and long term challenges related to the sovereignty, the replicability and the scalability of the innovative digital solutions demanded to leverage technology for impactful green transformation in all covered territories.

Concretely, SN has reduced its "time to market" by at least 6 months to serve its first users in the 10 pilot rural communities. Thanks to the knowledge transfer and hands-on support of the EDIH related to the implementation and exploitation of interoperable digital platform and mutualised digital services targeting rural territories based on open standard and open source components, SN is well armed to ensure its digital sovereignty under a 100% public governance.

Through the reference to the Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms, especially for the design of the harmonised data models (MIM2 / Smart Data Models) and Context Information Management (MIM1 / NGSI-LD + dRural Metaplatform) and strong access control and contracts policies, and digital services offers publication (MIM3 / DS4SSCC Trust Framework + dRural Marketplace) is quite aligned with the Community of Cities and Territories willing to share and collaborate together at regional, national, european levels in order to deploy and exploit replicable and scalable digital solutions. 

Do's

1. Think global: Leverage the existing deliverables from European Communities such as:

   • Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC)

   • Living-in.eu

   • Relevant projects like dRural and DS4SSCC.

2. Act local: Engage local pilot communities from the beginning to ensure the solutions address their concrete needs.

3. Prioritise operational solutions: Focus on delivering solutions that can be practically implemented and meet immediate needs of users.

4. Mutualise efforts: Balance generic features with customisation or configuration to meet local needs while maintaining the ability to scale or replicate.

5. Scale or fail fast: Start small with pilot implementations, and scale based on real user feedback or pivot quickly if necessary.

6. Coordinate transparently: Work openly with public and private stakeholders by:

   • Clearly defining roles and responsibilities.

   • Using a technical architecture to assign and bound those responsibilities.

Don'ts

1. Don’t overlook feedback from real users: Implement pilot programs and gather real-world feedback before fully scaling solutions.

2. Avoid isolated development: Ensure efforts are not siloed. Collaboration between stakeholders is key to achieving replicability and scalability.

3. Don’t focus solely on customisation: While customisation is important, prioritise finding a balance with generic features to avoid creating solutions that are too specific and hard to scale.