The EDIC Sandbox Alliance: instrument for validations from practice

The LDT CitiVERSE EDIC aims to close the gap between the results of European and National innovation calls and the actual operationalization thereof in the primary processes of cities and regions. For this the interoperability, replicability, scalability and robustness of solutions and infrastructure must be validated in the context and dynamics of city’s daily practices. To do so products, services and facilities need to be tested beyond pilot phase in the sandboxes of cities and regions themselves.

To this end the EDIC Sandbox Alliance is being designed as a ‘validation from practice’ instrument. The EDIC Sandbox Alliance contains a group of leading cities that are willing and able connect their sandboxes to test, validate and deploy the EDIC tools, infrastructure and services on a Pan-European scale.

• The EDIC Sandbox Alliance is open to every city. To develop the principles of cooperation, the Alliance will start with a core group of cities that involve Valencia, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Tampere and Riga.
• The EDIC will provide a common platform to document validations in a harmonized way, making results exchangeable and comparable and thus enhancing cooperation.
• An EDIC Sandbox Working Group will identify and plan validations so capacity and funding can be prioritized and planned in a predictable way.
• Concrete city use cases and fundamental infrastructure issues will be jointly programmed as they are interdependent and instrumental to each other. Value cases deliver proof of value (policy, societal and operational value) for cities and regions and the fundamental infrastructure facilitates the capacity building to operationalize interoperable dataflows, trusted transactions and delivery and enhances the digital maturity and digital sovereignty of cities and regions in a structural way.
  This public digital infrastructure lays the foundation for a thriving public-private application ecosystem (DT-marketplace/ -Appstore).
• The Sandbox Cities ecosystems will function as a best practice model to show the working in practice of the EDIC portfolio. The cities will factual function as ‘showroom’ and become ‘EDIC-outlets’ for other European Cities.