Bandung Mayor quadruples smart city budget

Also recruiting crack team of programmers.

Bandung city in Indonesia will quadruple the budget for its smart city programme next year, from IDR25 billion (US$1.8 million) to IDR 100billion (US$7.3 million), Mayor Ridwan Kamil said. This will be used to build infrastructure in the city and train civil servants to use online services. The government has already launched a command centre this year that collects and analyses data from social media, CCTV and the city’s emergency alerts system. Mayor Kamil also wants the city to provide more online services to citizens, and is recruiting 12 programmers to build apps for the government. “For smart city, I need a dozen people who are good at coding,” he said to participants of the nationwide Hackathon Merdeka 2.0 on Sunday. “They are specifically assigned to create applications that are needed for the programme.” Bandung wants to build 1000 applications by 2017 to ease bureaucracy and provide services to citizens. The city now has 320, and the remaining 680 will be built by the new team of programmers.