Hi #smartcommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast I have another great conversation with Calum Cameron. Based in Estonia for the last 15 years, Calum is the CEO of Digital Path, a company that works to build responsive digital societies with governments, industry and entrepreneurs. Calum and I last spoke in 2020 in Episode 185, an episode so good we replayed it in our Summer Series of December 2021, so Calum is back to give us a full update. We begin by Calum telling us about his background in corporate IT, his passion for helping people to create change through digital transformation and innovation as well as giving people the tools and resources to do so, and we discuss some of the citizen lead initiatives I have seen in Australia helping to create change. We then discuss the societal shifts we have both seen in communities due to the pandemic, Calum tells us what a Smart Community means to him, before he discusses some of the shifts he has seen in the Smart Communities space since we last spoke in 2020. Calum then tells us about some of the effects the pandemic had on services in Estonia, and some of the exciting projects he has been working on. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of collaboration and the need for transparency to create trust in communities. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it! 

Listen here: 

What we cover in this episode:

• Calum’s corporate IT background mainly in banks and energy companies
• His passion for helping people create change through digital transformation and innovation, and giving people the tools and resources to do so 
• Some citizen lead initiatives Zoe has seen in Australia to help create change 
• The societal shifts in communities we have seen due to the pandemic  
• What a Smart Community means to Calum
• Some of the shifts in the Smart Communities space Calum has seen since last recording in 2020
• The effect the pandemic had on services in Estonia
• Some of the projects Calum has been working on 
• The emerging trends of collaboration and the need for transparency to create trust in society 

Quotes: 

“It’s amazing what happens when you give people a moment to just stop and think for a little bit. Yeah. Which I guess is one of the few benefits of the pandemic has been that people have been sort of leaves for a short while. They weren’t so busy anymore.”

“I think the question is more about do I actually really need to be in the office. And people do want to go into the office as well, because there’s still that social aspect of being in the office as well. But now, people are focused on what the value is [and] what the important part is about being there as opposed to being there because they have to be there.”

“First and foremost, [Smart Communities] it’s [about] community, it’s [about] people. And then it’s overlaid with tech and data, particularly data flows, which makes it or at least has the potential to make it more sustainable, more creative, more fun.”

“If people are having fun, they tend to come up with better ideas, they tend to create a lot more, and so forth. I’m basically having fun, means we get more out of what we’re doing.”

“[Digital] transformation has sped up as a lot of corporations and a lot of governments have recognised there’s greater risk in not transforming, then there is in actually going through that transformational process.”

“Something that’s really significant in this space is trust. It’s trust in the data, the services, the availability of everything. So if you don’t have that resilience there, then it does actually undermine trust as well. Which means that the whole progress just gets slowed down or stopped.”

“Another thing about smart communities, it all comes back to the data and how that can be abused, particularly through disinformation. And because the point of disinformation is not necessarily to get people to believe something different. It’s just to remove the possibility for them to believe in anything or it’s removing that trust from the societal level.” 

“[We] need to double down on transparency, because that creates trust, that transparency, but also, educating and motivating people to investigate stuff themselves.”

Links: 

Episode 185 with Calum Cameron 

Digital Path 

Connect:

Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community 

Connect with Calum via LinkedIn or email: calum@digitalpath.ee  

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community  

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital