Good ideas can come from anywhere. So we want to provide everyone the tools to build them!

It's our firm belief and conviction that the result of a co-created digital city of Antwerp is much stronger than one built by a few appointed stakeholders. And in order to make this a reality, we’re opening up our company and tools. Citizens, communities, students, startups, the creative industry and even governments can use our open data and services to create powerful innovation on a local level. And in the process, inspire others to do the same.

Antwerp City Platform as a Service: easy-to-use and 24/7 back-end services

A few months ago Digipolis Antwerp started the co-creation of an Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS) together with multiple startups. With this ACPaaS we will offer easily usable and always available engines for e.g. notifications, digital vault, multilanguage support, user management, webshop, logging and so on. We will provide reusable engines, an open SDK and APIs to accelerate the development, maximise integration and reduce the time to market. This will save the city and its reusers time and money.

The concept of ACPaaS: everyone can contribute to building a digital city

Some of these engines are very useful to present to a broad public so that anyone is able to use the necessary building blocks to create awesome citizen services. And that’s what we’re going to do! We’re offering a market place where you can find these APIs. The first one will be a User API. When creating an app you can integrate this login-service, meaning others can log in to your app or website with their A-profile, the digital identity of our users. Starting with this open service, we intend to release other services very soon, but to learn more about that you'll have to attend the Open cities, Smart cities session during Open Belgium 2016.

ACPaaS as a co-creation project?

It doesn't stop at what've just revealed, our dreams reach much further! We aim to maximize co-creation on several fronts in order to build and sustain future proof platform that anticipates the needs of our users. This is why, for instance, we appeal to our community to design an open citywide IoT architecture. Want to be part of it? Come to one of our Meetups to be a part of this.

Featured image above © City of Antwerp