Smart-city technology is sold on a promise of control, and too often delivers the opposite: a city that has to ask permission, and pay, to use what it already owns. It does not have to be this way.
A disclosure, since we are about to talk about trust.
I sell the kind of software this manifesto tells you to demand. So please read it the way you would read a locksmith's heartfelt essay on the importance of good locks: self-interested, and also correct. I have tried to write it so it stays useful even to the people I compete with, partly out of principle and partly because pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence, which is a poor way to begin.
Smart-city procurement has a peculiar quality. It is one of the few forms of shopping where the buyer routinely ends up renting back the thing they paid to own. A city spends a healthy six figures of public money on a "platform," cuts the ribbon, takes the photo, and then discovers eighteen months later that getting its own data out costs extra, or is not possible, or requires the gracious cooperation of the very vendor it would now quite like to replace. Nobody set out to engineer this. It simply happens whenever nobody writes the boring clauses.
What follows are the boring clauses, dressed up as a manifesto so you will keep reading.
1. OWN YOUR Data.
Full stop. Keep the right to take all of it out, any time, in an open format, without asking permission or paying a fee. Data you cannot leave with is data you only rent.
2. NEVER Lock-in.
Choose formats and interfaces you could walk away from. Every door you can leave through is a price you will never be charged.
3. THINK exit, theN entrance.
Agree how you leave before you agree to arrive: your data, your schemas and your documentation returned in open formats, at a price set now, not improvised later.
4. BE open, VERY OPEN.
Require open, documented standards such as NGSI-LD, or equivalent, and make every supplier meet you at the same interface. "Or equivalent" are the two most powerful words in a tender.
5. BE SENSIBLE.
Build the foundation before the showpiece. A shared data language first, so your numbers fit together. The big platform can wait until you genuinely need it.
6. Buy outcomes, not adjectives.
Specify what the system must do, and what you must be able to do with its data afterwards. Ask suppliers for verbs, not adjectives.
7. DEFINE OPEN, AND Score IT.
Write down what "open" means in your tender, then give it real points. What you grade is what you get. What you merely tick gets quietly dropped when the price gets tight.
8. Interoperability LEADS TO SOVEREIGNTY.
Decide who can see, audit and move the city's data, because that is who truly runs the city. The EU Interoperable Europe Act already stands with you.
A closing note, in the same spirit of disclosure.
None of this requires you to become a technologist. It requires you to behave like a customer spending other people's money on purpose, which, said with affection, is rarer in public procurement than it ought to be. You will not get a ribbon-cutting for a good exit clause. You will simply, quietly, still own your city in five years' time. That is the whole reward, and it is enormous.
And if a vendor objects to any of the above, note which vendor, and which clause. The manifesto rather enforces itself from there.