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OGCIO
25-01-2019

Welcome Remarks by Mr. Victor Lam, JP, Government Chief Information Officer, at the “FIWARE-WeGO Workshop”


Mr Lee (Kyong-yul Lee, Secretary General of WeGO), Ms Lagares (Eva Valle Lagares, Head of Trade Section, EU Office to Hong Kong & Macao), distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning. Welcome you all to Hong Kong. It is my great honour to join you at today’s FIWARE-WeGO Workshop on “The Future of Open Governance & Innovation in Asian Cities”. My gratitude goes to WeGO and the FIWARE Community for their joint efforts in organising this high-level workshop to provide a great opportunity for understanding the benefits of open governance principles, which are important in the sustainable development of a smart city.

I would like to take this opportunity to give you a brief overview of the smart city development in Hong Kong. As with many other major cities in the world, we believe that smart city development here can help address urban challenges, enhance our city management and improve the quality of living. To achieve this, we published our Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong in December 2017. The Blueprint covers more than 70 initiatives under six major areas, namely “Smart Mobility”, “Smart Living”, “Smart Environment”, “Smart People”, “Smart Government” and “Smart Economy”.

Specifically on “Smart Government”, we are pursuing a number of key infrastructure projects and initiatives under the Blueprint. I would like to share a few of these with you.

First, the eID. The Government will provide an electronic identity for all Hong Kong citizens so that everybody can use a single digital identity to conduct government and commercial transactions online. eID will become a key infrastructure for digital government transformation. We will also actively promote the adoption of eID among public and private sectors, in order to enable our citizens to use more online services under a single digital identity, such as e-banking and e-commerce applications, especially those provided by smaller enterprises because they need not put in too much resource to develop a separate authentication system themselves. We are now going at full steam aiming to roll out eID in mid-2020, and will start engaging our industry and private sectors to explore the possibility of early adoption later this year.

Second, the Multi-functional Smart Lampposts pilot scheme. We will install 400 smart lampposts in four busy districts for business and tourism. Through the smart sensors and cameras integrated with the smart lampposts, we can collect real-time city data such as those concerning traffic, weather, air quality, etc. and perform real-time data analysis to enhance traffic and city management. The data collected will also be disseminated real-time as open data for public consumption. Moreover, these lampposts can provide free Wi-Fi and facilitate installation of 5G mobile base stations by telecom operators. These smart lampposts will be installed progressively starting mid of this year.

Third, the Government Cloud platform. With the advancement of cloud technologies, we are revamping our infrastructure to build the Next Generation Government Cloud with a hybrid cloud design. Apart from implementing a reliable “Private Cloud”, we will also make use of “Public Cloud” services which are highly flexible, elastic and in compliance with security requirements to expand the system hosting capacity as and when required so as to meet the growing demand of the public on digital public services.

Riding on the Next Generation Government Cloud will be the Big Data Analytics Platform with all the tools and expertise to facilitate various data analytics projects by government departments, such as in the areas of food safety, traffic management, customs control, public health and disease trends, cyber security, etc. for improving government operations, forecasts and public services.

Last but not least, the open data policy. We have formulated a new open data policy last September to expedite the opening up of government data. Under the new policy, government departments are required to publish annual open data plans and allow the public to provide feedback and suggestions on how to open up more data. The first annual data plans have just been published by all bureaux and departments with some 650 new machine-readable datasets to be added this year on top of the current 3 000 plus datasets available for free access by the general public. It provides raw materials for technological research and city innovation for the wider community.

We are actively implementing various initiatives set out in the Blueprint and the progress is encouraging. We have made available copies of our Smart City Blueprint booklet for your handy reference and retention. You are also welcome to visit our thematic website (www.smartcity.gov.hk) for more information.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will have a fruitful and rewarding sharing session today. For those visiting Hong Kong, I also wish you a pleasant and memorable stay. Thank you.

- ENDS -