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Welcome to VivaScoop, your monthly rundown on everything Vivacity Technologies.
If you've only just joined the VivaScoop newsletter, welcome! We hope you find the breakdown of everything we're working on interesting and exciting. I know for me, its amazing to watch the cadence of how quickly the team can take ideas and projects from inception to completion. This includes our inaugural Design Partners Program for VivaCitadel, where we're inviting innovative municipalities to join a cohort helping to build better cities using technology. Our first Design Partners Program meeting kicks off on June 20th, so if you know of a city that might be interested in joining, do contact us.
Now, on with the show. To learn more about what we've been up to, herewith VivaScoop May!
The VivaTeam grows to 11 - Meet Kobe Shimoyama!
Vivacity is proud to welcome the newest member of the VivaTeam, Kobe Shimoyama, joining us in the role of Brand and Marketing Designer this summer! Kobe is a 3rd-year Computing Science student on a Co-op work term with Thompson Rivers University. Kobe has a passion for curating the user experience through composition and graphic design which makes him an excellent fit for the role. His past projects include a live single-page web application for sharing recipes, a mobile app, and a video game prototype featuring procedural dungeon generation. He also comes to Vivacity with an impressive tenure in customer service, having helped manage the customer service experience and composing regular customer communications in his work with the YMCA.
Kobe will complement our Business and Marketing Analyst, Cassandra Roberge, in creating striking media content and brand material for the Vivacity audience. He will help prepare presentations, pamphlets, reports, and other designs that are informative, accessible, and visually appealing. We can’t wait to get Kobe involved in some big projects in the coming months and see how he is able to grow through the course of his work term with us.
Please join us in welcoming Kobe!
Undertaking a Facilities Technology Assessment with the City of Kelowna
Earlier this month, the City of Kelowna engaged Vivacity to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the city’s core facilities and the systems that help run them. This Facilities Technology Assessment will look to analyze the building control systems and IT infrastructure in some core city buildings to better understand the systems that are currently in place and how they could be improved for longer-term sustainability. Over the next 5 months, Vivacity will undertake a review of the key systems in place, get input from stakeholders, conduct some market research, and provide a roadmap of priority-based initiatives to reach the city’s ideal future state for their infrastructure while meeting their current and future operational needs.
This project will be led by our talented Director of People and Projects, Dr. Premie Naicker. With the knowledge and support of the VivaTeam, we know this project will be a success and have a major impact for the state of Kelowna’s technological future as they work towards their goal of becoming an intelligent city!
Prince George and Campbell River Join the VivaCitadel Design Partners Program
The VivaTeam is thrilled to announce the two newest members of the VivaCitadel Design Partners Program: the City of Prince George and the City of Campbell River!
The Design Partners Program aims to provide municipalities with the ability to give input into the direction of VivaCitadel, Vivacity’s intelligent city data management platform, providing valuable feedback and helping scale our solution so it can be used by municipalities across the country.
Through the Design Partners Program, cities join in conversations with like-minded, innovation-driven municipal leaders who see the value in using VivaCitadel to help improve their service delivery processes, starting with the Property Information Request process. These conversations will help the VivaTeam identify value-added features, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and ensure that VivaCitadel as a platform is widely applicable for this key municipal process. We also plan to use these meetings as an opportunity to share progress through demos and get the community involved in developing a solution they can rely on.
We’re eager to collaborate with our Design Partners to refine VivaCitadel into an indispensable tool for their communities, with the inaugural meeting set for June 20th! You can read more about the Design Partners Program and its newest members here.
6 Ways First Nations can implement OCAP - A Data Governance White Paper
Vivacity’s partnerships with Indigenous communities and organizations such as Simpcw Resources Group and Saulteau First Nations have introduced us to the unique opportunities and challenges experienced within First Nations communities. One such opportunity and subsequent challenge was the idea of data sovereignty for nations, and how difficult it can be to assert and maintain, as well as its importance for the wellbeing of the community. This introduced us to the principles of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP) which form a comprehensive guideline for data sovereignty for Indigenous communities.
In our learnings about OCAP, we realized how under-recognized the philosophies were among First Nations communities as it can be difficult to find the time and resources to explore this topic. That is why we decided to further our knowledge to understand OCAP and the ways it can help nations to assert their rights to data sovereignty. Now, we want to share that knowledge.
This month, we released a white paper authored by our Business and Marketing Analyst, Cassandra Roberge, proposing six IT initiatives for Indigenous communities to facilitate OCAP within their jurisdictions. You can find and download the white paper on our website here!
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Vivacity Technologies Ltd., Fraser St., Kamloops, British Columbia
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