RED DEER, Alta. – Public feedback played a central role in Lethbridge’s application for Infrastructure Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge, the city’s IT general manager explained during a recent presentation.

During the 2018 Municipal Information Systems Association (MISA) Prairies conference, Trevor Butler walked attendees through the city’s development process in building the application, which involved developing multiple “challenge statements” – the 50-words-or-less mission statement that Infrastructure Canada wanted municipalities to adopt as their applications’ guiding principle – and refining them into a single statement based on feedback from its approximately 115,000 residents.

“This was not a technology challenge in my mind,” Butler told the audience. “It was about finding out what the challenges were in our community from the perspective of our community members, and how we as partners could help address those challenges in ways that we couldn’t have previously… by harnessing the power of data and connected technology.”

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