Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the city, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
[00:00:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu, and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
[00:00:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: Smart in the city is brought to you by BABLE Smart cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE Smartcities EU.
[00:00:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: So welcome to another episode of Smart in the city. I'm really, really excited to have the next guest with me today, and we're really digging into the topic of resilience and how digital tools can support resiliency efforts. So of course, a country that has unfortunately needed to be extra resilient in the recent couple of years and has in fact proven profound resiliency of the people is Ukraine. So with me today, I have Victoria Itskovych. She's the chief information officer of Kiev City Council. Welcome, Victoria.
Thank you.
[00:01:23] Victoria Itskovych: Thank you for having me here.
[00:01:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely. My pleasure. When I got the request to have you on, I immediately said yes, it's really a pleasure to have you on and this topic is ever so important for us to talk about. So with that, we have to get started with a little bit of a teaser question just to get us warmed up before we start the interview.
So I was wondering if you had to describe Kiev's journey with digital transformation in three emojis, which emojis would you choose?
[00:02:00] Victoria Itskovych: That's a great question, really.
So I would start from the emoji of fire, not the fire itself, but the amount of problems and places we had to make something and to improve something. So that means fire.
Next would be the emoji of umbrella. At the stage when we already eliminated the fire and started to gather all these things we have here under one umbrella, and the third image would be the rocket. It's time when we are already under the umbrella and starting from that point, we can go into the space. So that would be the three emerges of our digital journey.
[00:02:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good choices. I like that a lot.
Good. So I want to first touch on a little bit about you and to let our listeners know who you are. What is your background? How did you get into this topic and into your role today?
[00:03:15] Victoria Itskovych: I worked in it sphere for all of my life.
I am a PhD in computer science.
I worked for the majority of time. I worked for commercial companies. So I led the teams of IT engineers and IT architects, also in Kiev. I was born in Kyiv and I lived here for all my life. However, I worked in a commercial field, and about three years ago, I joined the team of Kyiv city council. So I became basically the governmental servant, and I proceeded doing this in the municipal field, the managing people, managing it engineers, and managing it projects. So in general, everything I did was smoothly. And all my background, I had, it leveraged me a lot in the work I do now.
[00:04:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very interesting background. So thanks for sharing.
Now to dig a little bit into the challenges that your city is facing.
Of course, Kyiv is facing extraordinary challenges at the moment.
Can you share a little bit about what the role Kiev digital has been playing in maintaining safety for residents during these very difficult times?
[00:04:45] Victoria Itskovych: Probably it would be better to answer this question by describing the first weeks of the war, of the intrusion.
When the war started, we as a team, the intrusion started. We as a team, gathered on our data center, municipal data center. We lived there together, I mean lived, physically, slept, and did everything we need to do. We were hardly attacked. Also in the cybersecurity field, there were definitely a mess in Kiev City. Nobody knew what to do. We had a constant missile attacks. And the first thing we did with Kyiv digital app, we had it before the war, and it was like the transportation up, the parking app, and because it was transportation up, the majority of people had it installed already.
So we transformed the app into life saving tool. First, we launched where the air rate alerts in the application, because for you to understand, the Kiev city was equipped with all the Soviet Union times, syrian system. Now it covers the whole city, because it was renovated and something. However, these days it covered only probably 30% of the area of Kyiv. So the majority of people didn't hear the Syrian and didn't know that the missile attack is coming. So we transformed the application. We put their air raid alerts that came immediately as a push notification, which is obviously a life saving thing. After that, we introduced also the signal of all clear in the application, and it works. Still another thing we did was with the resources. When the war started, everything closed in Kyiv city. Not because the businesses were had to close. There were no rules to close, but because of the mess, and nobody knew what to do.
So people had no places to purchase food, pharmacy, or had no source of information, rather where they can purchase something. Because Google Maps were not the source of information for the times, because Google, for the security reasons, obviously, they turned off the possibility for business owners to change working hours and working days in the Google Maps. So what we did, we started to introduce the maps of essential things in Kyiv city, in Kiev digital app. We started with the pharmacies. Then there were grocery stores, then there were gas stations, some repairing stores, automobile repairing stores. And then we came to the not so essential for living, but really essential for your well being. Things like coffee shops, like barbaris, etcetera. And the Kiev started to leave, really, despite the fact that in the lowest times. So before the intrusion, we had, like, almost 4 million people in Kyiv. In the lowest times, it was end of March, start of April, we had 700,000. So it's less than one quarter of people left in Kyiv. Now it's again the same amount that it was before the war. But there were times that not many people in Kyiv and not many things were opened. So that was what we did. Also we did in the application, the evacuation flights, all the important information, what you need to survive, because in such hard times, people need the trusted channel with the municipality to understand what is really going on and to not to believe the fake information that is, I don't know, around the Internet. So that's it generally, yeah.
[00:09:09] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really, really fascinating.
About the Kiev digital app, can you talk a little bit more about what the process that you went through to put these different layers into the app that weren't there previously in such dire time? Can you elaborate more on, like, what went into that? What were the challenges? How did you actually execute this?
[00:09:33] Victoria Itskovych: When you. When you face such situation that you never thought that you would face in your life?
You. You have, like, start to have more than 24 hours and more than seven days a week. So it was like hell over work. So we did. In a. In a couple of days, we did that we. Something that we probably would do in previous times for a month, it was just 24/7 working of the developers of every people, not only our people that work in the municipality, but the volunteers. Everybody would try to help the developers with the skills. The engineers with the skills were ready to help to do this. So I'm trying to answer your question in structured, in systematic way, but for this question, it's impossible. We just did it because we allocated.
[00:10:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: All you had to.
It's incredible what you can accomplish when there is that dire pressure on you, right?
But for other cities who maybe they have a digital app, but it doesn't have as many functionalities.
Maybe it's more like the app that you had previously, right? More like transport, focus, etcetera.
Would you recommend doing this kind of with foresight, like already integrating everything on it right now more urgently, in case there are more actions or how would you recommend to other cities to do this?
[00:11:16] Victoria Itskovych: Absolutely. I mean, not integrate everything and anything. It's impossible. But sit and think about the worst scenario. It's really worse to do now because you see what is happening. We had like pandemic and we thought the whole world said that the pandemic is the worst thing, that nothing can be worse. Now we have war, what we can have next. I don't want to be pessimistic, but we have to be prepared always. So the city, municipality have to sit and think to try to imagine the worst scenario and the goals of the municipality in this worst scenario. One of these goals will be to communicate with people, with people in your area, to help them survive. So, yes, it would be good that the municipalities that already have some application for transportation, parking, anything electronic democracy that is already in place on. On the mobile phones of the citizens, to put there upfront some functions that will help people survive and help people communicate with the municipality.
[00:12:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Really, really important. I think for everyone to put that as a priority. I think when you're thinking about planning for these types of situations, weren't there though, like, wouldn't people argue though, that there's maybe it's not sometimes the best communication method because there's like wifi outages, maybe other communication difficulties where people can't access the digital infrastructure that they need.
How would you respond to that?
[00:12:55] Victoria Itskovych: Of course, it's not the only channel. If it would be the only channel.
I made an example with the Syrians. Yes. Now we are having just physical Syrians. And if you. In a case that you don't have the mobile phone or you don't have any connection. Yeah. You have to hear the Syrian. If you're in the city, we can't make everything working like 100%, but we have to make all the efforts, all the reserve channels in order to person to get this information. Wi Fi grade the mobile operator grade what we are doing now in key. For example, probably you know that we are having major blackouts. And when we are having the blackouts, of course, the mobile connection starting to degrade because the mobile operators can't power so many base stations at once with generators.
And we have in Kiev such places that are called invincibility points. So it's a place where a person can come, especially in winter. Why especially in winter? Because when we have the blackout with electricity, the heating is going down. So this is a place where people can gather, they have the Internet connection with the starlink, they have the heating, they have something to power with a power generator, etcetera, etcetera. So the city adapts, puts these and these efforts in order to people for survival.
[00:14:37] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good point.
So besides the app, I'm guessing that you also had to adapt other parts of your digital infrastructure to make it more resilient in these times.
Can you elaborate a little bit more on which other adaptations you've had to make?
[00:14:59] Victoria Itskovych: Yeah, so before I, we are municipality. So nobody, when we are doing as a municipality, it management, doing our disaster recovery plans or business continuity plans, you never think about such a risk like missile can come to your data center. Yes. Usually you think like something will power outage or something, one server will go out. Nobody thinks about the complete destruction of the data center. So now we have to think about this. Our municipal data center was and is the usual building, not something else. So from the infrastructure perspective, we became redundant. So we moved to the cloud. Now we have both onsite and cloud infrastructure, thanks to the generosity of the Microsoft.
I'm not advertising here, just, just its reality, because Microsoft and a lot of other international vendors and companies heavily investing in ukrainian infrastructure for the governmental sphere, for the commercial sphere, etcetera. So we are using cloud infrastructure to be redundant for the networking infrastructure, of course. We are using everything like UPS generators, diesel or gas generators in order to power our network. We are using now the IoT devices a lot based on the LoRaWAN technology, because Lora allows to use very energy efficient devices that can leave on one battery for like five, seven years without external power. And we are now heavily using LoRaWAN as a reserve communication channel to some important things in the city, like smart lightning, for example. So management of lighters. And so, yeah, we have to be adaptable. There is no one solution. But every time we have to ask ourselves what else can happen and what will be the worst and how we will manage it.
[00:17:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very, very important points as well.
When I was talking to your colleague, also before this, she mentioned some aspects of integrating education and mental health into your digital framework, which I would love to touch on and understand better how you're doing that, how they're contributing to your overall resilience strategy.
[00:17:52] Victoria Itskovych: I probably would start with education. So again, when the war started, a lot of people went away from Kyiv, and these were people with children, and we had, there were times, and when the educational process started, we had like less than half students on site. The other were some of them were outside somewhere in Ukraine, but not in Kiev, and the other were abroad. So we, as the educational system in Kiev, we had to move to the hybrid or blended education in order for students not to lose the educational process. And for this purpose, we introduced the digital education platform in Kiev City. It's electronic journal. It's a possibility to get the home tasks and do the home tasks. It's possibility to connect with the teacher digitally, and it's possibility for the teacher to make the course remotely and to study and to educate children remotely. Now, when the majority of the students came back to Kiev, the platform still works. And because we have another challenges, like for example, we have in blackout again, some schools are not able to operate during blackout, or we are having missile attacks and children go to the shelter under the school, educational process have to be prolonged. So we are using these digital educational platform to do this.
Another thing with the mental health.
I would say that Ukrainians before the war, never considered because of Soviet Union, you know, heritage, we really never considered mental health as something real. Yes, I mean, not all, but the majority. And now everything changed. Now we see and feel like mental health influences everything we are doing. There is no untouched person left here in Ukraine. For now, everybody has somebody who he lost or she lost, somebody close.
Everybody suffers from missile attacks or, I don't know, we have three, four, five missile attacks a day or alerts. It influences much the grown ups, the children's, the veterans, everybody who comes from the war. So what we did, we, we have a big project with Bloomberg philanthropies. It is connected with digital transformation. And one of the streams of this project is connected with mental health. And inside this stream, we launched different projects.
One of them is mental health emergency service for the schools.
When children, when something happens in the school, not necessarily the missile attack, but somebody's hurt, somebody bullying, somebody feels bad, or something very bad happens, a person died, a children or something. The emergency service of the psychologist, the specifically educated psychologist for this type of situation, they come to the school and they work with children, they work with teachers, they work with parents in order to cope the situation.
Another thing that we are launching now is a specific mental health services for the veterans. And we are going to put all the services in one digital platform. So we already, in Kiev City, we already have the platform for veterans, where they get the social services or medical services or education. And we will put there also the mental health services for them and for their families. And we make the polling about the mental health also through Kiev digital app. One of the big part of the functionality of Kiev digital app is electronic democracy. And inside it there is a polling functionality. And we are making the polling about your mental health and how you feel yourself. And we get like information that more than 80% of respondents, they say that they have mental health issues.
[00:22:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: Amazing initiatives. Thanks so much for sharing, Victoria. I really, I just applaud you and your team and all the work you're doing there. It's really, really incredible. So, so thank you so much for sharing that.
So I'm also wondering a little bit more. Throughout the last couple years, many stakeholders, I'm sure, are asking, what can we do to help?
How can we get involved in what you're doing?
What do you need from the listeners who are listening from this? What do you need from external people to support your initiatives? Do you have any kind of call for them?
[00:23:38] Victoria Itskovych: Of course. And we are one of the reasons why we take part in different international conferences and we got the awards. For example, we got the Smart City award in Barcelona, Smart City Forum, and we have like award in Mobile World Congress and awards for electronic democracy.
One of the reasons why we are doing this is the call to action for the world. And of course, we ask for the help from the world.
So what I would say is important for us. We need help with technology, of course, from the technology companies, from the vendors.
We need donations for some things that we are going to do. We have the portfolio of projects that we can share with organization companies. And each company or organization can think how they can help us if they want. It's not necessary. Would be donation. Of course. Technology people, workforce ideas would be great. We have. One of the projects, for example, we launched was resilience accelerator, where we put the problems we need to solve. In Kiev, the majority of them were energetical problems, the problems that don't have the solution for now. And of course, we ask from the world community for the solutions and for your support.
[00:25:23] Tamlyn Shimizu: Of course.
Yeah, thank you so much. Really good call out if there are any links. Also to support any of the initiatives. We'll make sure to link that also below so that we make sure to connect that really well with any of the listeners. So do you feel like there are any additional tools or mechanisms that you need to really accelerate this digital transformation that's happening in Kyiv, such as, you know, is it that you need more funding as many cities do?
What do you feel like is really missing from the puzzle to accelerate the work that you're doing?
[00:26:05] Victoria Itskovych: Funding and people funding. It's obvious people.
We have less and less people now. A lot of them went away, a lot of them went fighting. And yes, we need, we need, in fact, we need workforce. If somebody wants to come to Ukraine from international community and work with us, please, we are happy.
[00:26:33] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thank you so much. The last question I have in the main interview part is really if we missed anything in the interview, I'd like to give you the open floor in case you have anything and any other topic that you would like to talk about. You can take the open floor now. If you don't, if you think we covered it perfectly, then no need to take it. But if you have anything else, now's your time.
[00:26:59] Victoria Itskovych: One short, one short notice is you asked what we need, and I want to add what we can do.
Probably the most precious thing, what we have and we can share is our experience. So we are ready to connect with the cities or with the countries or the communities to share our experience of resilience. I mean, it's in deep technical way, we can act as a consultant in such a thing. And I encourage all the cities and communities to sit now and think about it. Would bad to say to think about the worst, but to think about the worst scenario. We are talking not about the war, but about anything like earthquakes, floodings, any other emergencies. And are you prepared? Think about it and in case you have any questions, reach us out.
[00:28:05] Tamlyn Shimizu: Amazing. Thank you so much.
Now we just move on to our segment of today. Our segment that we chose for you is trial and error.
Trial and error.
What went wrong, what mistakes were made along the way, and more importantly, what lessons were learned.
So hindsight is 2020, as we like to say. I'm sure when you were in the moment, there were some mistakes made, some things you would do differently. Now, do you have an example that comes into your mind?
[00:28:42] Victoria Itskovych: Yeah, we did a lot of mistakes.
I mean, it's always. So from the technology perspective, we were not redundant enough, obviously. So we had, our data center was not redundant enough. We didn't use clouds as much as we had to use it. Yeah, we have some restrictions on the legislation level in Ukraine, but they are not so heavy. So we could use the cloud infrastructure more and more.
And in this case, we would be more prepared to the situation we are having now.
Document the disaster recovery plans, not have it in your head or in the head of your engineers, and gather the team that already will be prepared.
[00:29:45] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good lessons to share with everyone and to reiterate that importance. So many cities are, maybe they won't face an intrusion but maybe they will face many cities across Europe especially are facing so many different natural disasters. We're working with Istanbul and they're having a lot of preparedness around earthquakes that will inevitably happen. Flooding was impacting where I'm sitting in Germany, in the south of Germany very recently.
So this is a crucial, crucial topic for cities across Europe. So thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. There.
Now is the final, final question. It's a question we ask every single guest that comes onto the podcast. The question is to you, what is a smart city?
[00:30:39] Victoria Itskovych: I would say smart city, smart people. Smart city is a resilient city.
I don't want to emphasize much about the technology, because now technology is something that inevitable part of our lifetime. So smart city is, for me, it's about resilience and about adaptability to any situation.
[00:31:01] Tamlyn Shimizu: Perfect and a perfect way to close this out. Again, I have to say thank you so much, Victoria, for coming on to the podcast. I'm excited that you've given me the opportunity to share a little bit more on your story and all the lessons that you've learned and also your willingness to help other cities. All of that's just incredible. I applaud you once again for all of the work and dedication that you have for this. So thank you so much and I hope you can come back sometime.
[00:31:32] Victoria Itskovych: Thank you. Thank you for invitation. Thank you for your work.
[00:31:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: Also, thank you so much. And also thanks to our listeners. It was an incredible episode, so I hope you enjoyed it. And don't forget, you can always find out more about initiatives, projects, solutions, implementations, everything above when you create a free account on BABLE Dash smartcities EU so thank you so much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
