BEE SMART CITY PLATFORM FEATURES

Your Dashboard is the central starting point for your activities and contributions on bee smart city. It can be reached via the home icon in the navigation bar and gives you an efficient overview of relevant KPI’s and updates. Here you can see the newest solution submissions and articles posted on bee smart city. The intuitive navigation enables you to manage your activities and to access interesting information easily and quickly.

Your profile forms the basis for interactions with other platform members. Let others know who you are and make it easy for them to get in contact with you. Fully completed profiles receive much more attention and interactions than incomplete ones.

Please make sure to add the following information to your profile:

• your full name
• a profile image
• the company / organization you work for
• your job title
• an "about me" description
• your city / municipality (that you work for or live in)
• what you offer (offering tags)
• what you seek (seeking tags)
  
  

You can also customize your profile background image.

Related Guide:
How to optimize my Profile Page

Direct Messaging functionality enables you to directly interact with other platform and community members – be it to exchange experiences, discuss best-practices, talk and learn about smart city solutions, forge new collaborations, initiate new partnerships, or to discuss events or tenders.

You can send messages to members as an initial request to connect with you. Messages to non-contacts are limited to 5 per day.

Requests to connect with other members can be found in your "pending contacts" list. Once they have approved the connection, they are moved to the "my contacts" list.

You can send unlimited messages to all contacts that you are directly connected with (everyone in your "my contacts" list).

In order to prevent misuse, we have added the possibility to report messages with inappropriate content or spam intentions. In the case of unwanted contact requests, you have the possibility to add these contacts to your “ignored members” list.

The matching on your messaging page is triggered by the seeking and offering tags stated in your profile. Matched contacts are displayed based on the fit between what they search and what you are offering (based on your offering tags) and what they offer that you are searching (based on your seeking tags).

For the best matching results, please make sure to add concise searching and offering tags to your profile. You can add up to 10 search and offer tags, respectively.

Related Guide:
How to optimize my Profile Page

Search through the smart city solution database using the search bar or navigate through the database by clicking on "explore" in the main navigation:

• Via the "Solutions" tab, you can choose different filters to directly find solutions: by indicator, by country, by spatial level, by relevance, as well as sorted by newest solutions and most popular solutions (most smarts).
  
  
•  Via the "Trends" tab, you can search through the database based on our six main smart city indicators, by searching for specific keywords, or by using tags to identify solutions.

You can easily add solutions to the database to increase the visibility of your solutions and/or to contribute to the sharing of best practices between all members.

Click on the "add solution" button in the main navigation to add solutions to the database.

Related Guide:
How to add and optimize my Smart City Solution

Share your solutions in social media and distribute them in your network to receive more "smarts" and to generate new partnerships and business leads.

You can also share best practice solutions of other members.

To share a solution, please open the respective solution and use the sharing buttons to share it. Make sure to add a personal comment and hashtags to the post before sharing it.

Related Guide:
How to add and optimize my Smart City Solution

Claim your participation in solutions to verify solutions as an involved partner, city or client, and invite your partners to claim their participation in your solutions.

To claim a solution, open the respective solution and click on "claim your involvement" in the "Involved Parties" section. Be aware that the verification by the solution moderator might take some time.

Bookmark solutions that are interesting to you for easier later access. To bookmark a solution, click on the star behind the solution name or click on the follow button marked with a star icon.

You can find your bookmarked solutions in the "Favorites" section in your dashboard or via the dropdown menu that opens when clicking on your profile image in the main navigation.

"Smart" (that’s our "like") solutions that you consider efficient or innovative and share them with your network or in social media to recommend these solutions to others.

You can "smart" solutions by clicking on the "smart" button on the respective solution page.

The notification function will keep you up to date and provide you with important information regarding the bee smart city platform. Notifications will inform you about new features, announcements and other upcoming network activities.

You can access notifications at any time via the "notifications" button in the main navigation.

We have added an exact match search function for more efficient search results. You can now search for fixed strings by embracing the words in quotation marks.

Example: "fixed string"

Furthermore, we have implemented a subtract modifier to exclude words you don’t want in the search results. To exclude single words, declare them as follows: -"word1" –"word2" –"word3".

Example: open data -apps

Please note that we search for "word1" AND "word2" AND "word3" first, only if there is no hit, we search for "word1" OR "word2" OR "word3"

Solution categories give you a detailed view on different trending smart city topics and solution verticals. They include a detailed description of the respective topic, a solution ranking based on smarts, and a high quality article on the topic that provides you detailed market insights and information on the players in the chosen market segment or vertical.

City pages can be reached through your dashboard, member pages and solutions. At first glance, you can learn more about a City's "Smart City Mission" and gain a first impression of its smart city strategy. Furthermore, you will see a ranking indicator based on the number of uploaded solutions and the city page also features a solution distribution by indicators to assess the status quo of the selected city.

The tag pages will help you to stay up-to-date on smart city trends. Every smart city indicator (e.g. smart mobility) has sub-indicators (e.g. e-mobility, mobility as a service) and solution categories (e-scooter, e-bike) that are expressed by tags. On the pages for each tag, you can find a short description of the topic as well as a ranking of related solutions.

We use 6 Smart City Indicators to categorize solutions. The 6 main smart city indicators are:

• Smart Economy
• Smart Environment
• Smart Government
• Smart Living
• Smart Mobility
• Smart People

They help to segment the smart city ecosystem into different sub-indicators and solution categories. You can find more information on the sub-segments in the feature descriptions of "solution categories" and "tags".