Wrexham looks back to the future with talking lampposts, town centre Wifi and apps

If historic efforts on digital progress had been sustained and improved, Wrexham could have seen itself at the forefront of digital ‘SMART town’ efforts.

That was an unspoken conclusion of a recent meeting looking into the future of the town centre, which included details on ‘SMART town’ projects.

Welsh Government explain a SMART town as “…an urban area that uses different types of electronic methods and sensors to collect data. Insights gained from that data are used to manage assets, resources and services efficiently; in return, that data is used to improve the operations and future prosperity across the town.”

As we have been documenting members of the Employment, Business and Investment Scrutiny Committee met to discuss the town centre, that included a forward looking piece of work by a Task & Finish Group. As part of that details on SMART Towns’ were provided in documents, along with reference in the meeting itself.

Some elements were new, with councillors told of smart items such as bins and lampposts that would tell the council if they needed emptying or a new bulb to help maintenance and management.

Wrexham.com is convinced there were once talking bins in Wrexham at one point (as others remember) and this idea appears to have come around again, with “Hello Lamppost” project making inanimate objects talk. The meeting was told, “There’s a product called Hello Lamppost, where you can get inanimate objects in the town centre to talk to people and ask them how they feel. What they think is right or wrong with an area, and collect that information. It is a bit novel, it has its issues, but again, it is happening. It’s happening in Coventry, and it’s happening in other towns.”

The talking streetlights are expected to be courteous and pole-light.

Opening up data was also mentioned in line with a common with a theme of history repeating itself, the officer told the meeting, “I think the key thing for me is that we try to make as much as information open source”

“Big businesses buy this information because they can and they use that information, smaller businesses could never afford to do that.  The key has to be sharing that information with our small businesses, with our stakeholders in the town centre so they can make the decisions and use that technology and that information to suit their needs”.

Although the thrust on a ‘smart town’ appears to be providing business intelligence to private sectors, there is an element to council data, one example being given was town centre footfall counters appearing on a web based dashboard.

Wrexham.com first asked Wrexham Council about Open Data back in 2012, when Chester and Cheshire West launched dataset pages however we were told detail on things like car park capacity were not shareable. Wrexham had a half a million pound flirtation with public car park data, with a range of digital live signage installed but then suffering a long outage, before flickering back to life recently.

The ‘opendata’ buzzword has been used many times by Wrexham Council, with the concept of opening up information from the council emerging in different ways such as how to store and view historic council meetings, and the scrapping of detailed spending by the authority.

Back in 2017 the council itself noted the ‘vast array’ of data it held, stating it would “follow the principles of “open data” and “data transparency” making more public data available on-line” – it does not appear that has happened, with that corporate council strategy covering 2017-2020. The replacement ICT & Digital Strategy covering 2020-2023 does not contain the words ‘open data’ nor ‘transparency’, and the overall council plan does not repeat the policy.

Wrexham invested in saying hello for a while.

Another blast from the past was discussion around a ‘Wrexham app’, raised by Cllr Dana Davies as a possible vehicle to supply information locally and directly, as well as a possible consultation tool.

The officer told the councillors, “On a Wrexham app I’m going to stop short of proposing any solution, but absolutely Cardigan are cited as one of the the sort of the pioneers of this approach – obviously you have got to consider the size of Cardigan relative to Wrexham.

“The other key part about Cardigan’s delivery is that it was it was very much cross sector. It wasn’t just reliance on the local authority, and actually had a lot of freedoms and opportunities because it wasn’t the local authority.

“I think an idea of an app may be best suited, arguably allied to a BID, a Business Improvement District for clarity, so that it can be the vehicle for maintaining that information, which is not to say that the council couldn’t or shouldn’t have one. However I think in terms of following that Cardigan example it was that ability to access different parts of funding because procurement of digital technology is quite challenging because of revenue aspect to servicing maintenance licenses, so that that is something that needs to be considered.

Wrexham’s town centre WiFi kit installed in 2015

The Cardigan Town app was launched alongside free Wifi in the town centre. Again, Wrexham has been there before both with a Wrexham Says Hello app, and town centre Wifi that was much trailed but never quite got going despite a hefty price tag and lots of work.

Back in 2014 the same committee reviewed the performance of the WrexhamSaysHello / Hello World app, which saw 1,472 downloads in ten months, and cost £12,000 to develop back with a five figure promotional campaign. The WrexhamSaysHello twitter account appears still owned by Wrexham council and has nearly 8,000 followers – and is dormant.

No reference was made in the meeting that Wrexham has already explored and spent sizeable sums on similar projects previously, no assessment of those projects were offered, why they were abandoned, nor was that assessment asked for by councillors.

Other reports from the meeting:

• Lead councillor gives town centre rejuvenation résumé – “It is not all ‘not doom and gloom”
• Council “forget” to invite night time economy representatives to town centre debate, says local business owner
• Doubts cast over accuracy of Wrexham town centre footfall figures

(Top pic: Marty outside the Guildhall back in 2016 when we highlighted the odd timeframes involved in asking public questions at Executive Board meetings. Since then the Constitution has been ‘improved’, and instead of the deadline now being Wednesdays at noon, it is now five clear working days before the meeting. Generally meetings are held on Tuesdays, so for this month’s meeting questions would have had to be in the Tuesday the week before. To submit questions on the contents of reports before the Executive Board, usually published 24hrs after the deadline on the Wednesday, you would still require the skills of Emmett Lathrop Brown, PhD)