This story is written in 2035 remembering decisions that were made by the Oslo City team in 2021. This is an imaginary story inspired by some recent events.

Looking back at 2020: The year we started to look for change

15 years ago (in 2020), the big tech companies were dominating the Internet and there was a fear that the “winner takes it all” model of Internet would make some of the platform companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) more powerful than nation states, the local and regional players such as cities. The fear was that they would simply languish and lose their charm to the clickbait of the Internet,  citizens would be reduced to addicts of social media. 

Then, as 2020 progressed, COVID-19 took over the world and accelerated the world into a digital future which would have otherwise taken us 10-15 years to develop and realize. With work from home as the new normal, accompanied by increased usage of the Internet, citizens have become even more vulnerable to dependency on the big tech companies. Europe was struggling to reclaim its place in the world with a fresh look at the future and dabbling with regulatory instruments which could give everyone an equal chance. 

Trigger point: 17 May 2021 

For Norwegians, 17 May holds a special place both in history and in culture, yet, 17 may 2021 was extremely different.. The Independence day parade did not happen the usual way because of covid-19. However, some people came up with an approach of having the parade online in a virtual environment. This led to a discussion on the role of physical spaces and cities for the future, how to have a future which enables an equal and enriched life for all that is not confined to screens and addictive social media platforms, but rather a platform that could enable people to build a future and enjoy the life and surroundings, while staying connected and benefiting from social interaction.

Redefining the role of cities in the 21st Century 

Cities have existed for millenia and have been drivers for opportunity for its citizens, however, some might say they start losing their relevance in the digital future accelerated by pandemics like COVID-19. Around the sametime, Oslo City asked this very question and took bold steps and pioneered an approach to make the wider ecosystem relevant, attractive and encouraged the creation of new jobs reflecting the model where the cities become an enabler, empowering people to create artifacts relevant for the digital future of the society. 

Training people for the jobs that do not exist yet

One of the side effects of the industrial revolution was the education system, which trained people for jobs that they would pursue for life and retire from them. It worked well till the end of 20th Century. But in the early phases of the 21st century it was already evident that the top jobs of 2020 did not even exist in 2010. Which created an existential crisis for the education system from the industrial revolution. By 2020 onwards creative professionals were already spending upto 3-4 hours per day on learning and enriching their skills outside the working day to stay relevant. This latent demand created companies like COURSERA to create billions of dollars of market value already in 2021. So, it was evident to the team behind the Oslo City (OC)  which launched the initiative in 2021 that they have to prepare a city which would stay relevant in the future, would prepare citizens that are ready for the next shift and prepared for the jobs that are not created yet, the public spaces which are not just for aesthetics but to cocreate the future, participate in new technology development, enabling data donations from digital twins of the citizens and enabling citizens to create new value on top of the ambient computing environment of the city. 

Recipe that prepared the future: Empowering people with (compute and digital) Infrastructure and giving them the freedom to create!  

Humble beginnings of ambient computing: crowdsourcing Norwegian speech data and beyond

Already in 2020, the smart speakers have shown that the next era of the Internet lies in conversational AI or as they say voice activated devices. However, for smaller countries like Norway the language research has not seen that much investment which meant that the commercial products were lagging behind when it comes to offering the same experience for a Norwegian citizen compared to their english counterpart. The stakeholders recognised this gap and asked Norwegians to donate their voice recordings for building good speech generation and speech recognition systems. A similar movement from Finland inspired the Norwegian effort. 

Further the stakeholders recognised early on that similar to cult movies, people are engaged by dialogues in a movie. As we know today the user interface is no user interface and best jobs go to dialogue writers. With an open source effort many of the famous Norwegian personalities are now codified into their voice avatars and provisioned by the users in their day to day interactions with banks link DNB and in their home ambient devices.  

Strong foundation in next generation networks enabling physical spaces

On the other hand from the late 20th century and early 21st century there was a dominance of Nordic region in telecommunications leading much of the mobile communications revolutions. Nokia only lost its edge in early 2000s to the american giants like Apple and Google. But still that left the Nordics with a strong foundation and early adoption in general, with Nokia in Finland, Ericsson in Sweden and Telenor in Norway creating a strong ecosystem. 5G also marked the era of communication technologies where machine to machine communication, low latency, edge computing and massive MIMO became a reality. This led to the foundation of physical spaces to be computing enabled and interactive. Already in 2020, Aalto University was offering student courses to build Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality solutions for a shopping mall as a week long course. As Klaus Schwab puts in his book on the fourth Industrial revolution (4IR)  about 12 key enabling technologies, most of the key technologies of 4IR in Nordic countries were ready to be experienced and packaged for the citizen experience and participation in 2021. OSC had created several physical spaces with the next generation networks (5-6G now 7G), sensing technologies along with ambient display devices for citizens to use new services from the government, industry and citizens in general, city dwellers participate in creating new ideas on top of these physical platforms and most important many of them share / donate their behavior/health data for wider public good and service enhancement. 

Public spaces, retail sector and fashion industry are going through an era of digital revolution. 

The virtual clothing business from Dale of Norway for example is at 2 Billion USD and growing. Inspired by the virtual backgrounds in zoom in 2021, the sustainability conscious citizens now buy rugged clothes with only one pair which can last for years but thanks to augmented reality people can change their style with a click of the button! Again the users are very much involved in creating the new fashion with the brands as OSC has enabled a physical space where fashion designers can curate their ideas and organise fashion shows and seek feedback from the people in general. The Nordic countries have led the sustainable fashion movement world over and now people are moving towards green clothing where style comes from the virtual layer and comfort and long lasting nature of clothing are the main focus apart from having various sensing capabilities for collecting health and wellness data. 

Top 5 jobs in Norway in May 2035 

Total openings: 26000

Dialogue Writing : 9000

Digital Public Space Engagement Expert (Shopping Malls and Municipalities): 5000

Virtual Fashion designers: 1000 

Cyber Physical Systems Analytics Expert: 1000

Internet of Skills Teachers: 10000 

Up, up and Above! 

One of the pioneering setup that was developed initially was on Internet of Skills, OSC partnered and developed with various regions of the (skill hubs) world next generation 6G enabled skill studios already in 2022. This enabled the citizens in Oslo to learn from top experts in various crafts around the world. This has minimised the carbon footprint of many and is another hallmark towards sustainability.   

The investment that was made starting from 2021 in creating multiple engagement spaces for young people in Oslo based on technologies of 4IR has created today a future that puts Oslo in top 3 cities in the world. Not only has the city managed to survive the last two pandemics of 2030 and 2033 with almost no economic and health impact but has created a total economic contribution of 500 Billion USD in the last 3 years alone. 

The digital artifacts distributed by Oslo based companies capture creative inputs of millions of talented people all over the world. The digital experience of public spaces in Oslo with its citizens has created a possibility for Oslo to lead the world in terms of digital trends. They are the digital Louvres of this decade, curating the best from the world! Previously Oslo was known for the Nobel Peace Prize, now it is known for Digital Clothing of the Year, Voice Avatar of the year and many more such digital economy firsts, which did not exist 10 years ago. The title of Digital Valley for Oslo is rightly earned! 

Quick takeaways from the 15 years of journey of making of Oslo City 

Yearly cycle of citizen engagement that the OC team followed is as follows:

1. Drawing and Essay competition for School Students to further the vision (3 months): Oslo city regularly organised in Q1 of every year,  Drawing and Essay competition for young students with a target of 2035, how they want the city to deliver services to them and create opportunities for them. The OSC team would publish scenarios every year against which such essays and drawings were solicited. They were publicly showcased and through crowdsourcing and jury process top 35 ideas were selected.
2. Annual Maker Days  (1 week): In Q2 of every year the Oslo City partner institutes would invite citizens, students and industry to form adhoc groups and work together to realise some of the concepts and other new concepts in a 48 hours long process. Teams were asked to submit their solution against the essay, drawing competition or their own wild card idea. A top jury would then judge top 10 teams from the maker days every year. 
3. Oslo Future Fellows  (6 months): During the Q3-Q4, the team members of the top 10 teams from the maker day were selected to join the builder lab of Oslo City to work for next 6 months to realise their ideas and either launch them as startups or services in partnership with the stakeholders of the Oslo City. The fellows are paid a stipend for six months. The fellowship is  voluntary but over the years 90% of the selected teams have at least one member joining as a fellow in the builder lab. Also every cohort has seen more than 50% of the fellows are able to realise their ideas into robust startups or public good projects. The key factor here is the access to researchers from partner institutes to do top end science, access to lab facilities, compute infrastructure and support of industry and government stakeholders in adopting the solution proposed. 

In the last 15 years this engagement process has created 25 new citizen services, 15 unicorns and 200,000 jobs in total. More importantly it has created a framework of empowerment for the citizens and overall a resiliency for the city. The Oslo City model is now widely recognised and adopted already by 70 cities across the world.