Yesterday The Courier explored the background to Dundee’s bid to be named the Intelligent Community of the Year for 2008.

In the second part of a week-long series, we delve deeper into Dundee’s determination to succeed by looking at one element of the city’s success—the Digital Observatory.

First things first. The Digital Observatory is not a computer device for looking at the stars.

Its function is something far closer to home. It is a group of eminent people whose role it is to look at Dundee's digital networks, find out what they are used for, how well they are used, and to make recommendations on how things can be improved.

The city’s convener of economic development, Joe Morrow, takes up the story.

“In the wider Dundee Partnership there is one group in particular that cuts across organisational responsibilities which directly relates to the objectives of an intelligent community. That is the Digital City group.

“It was set up in 2003 when we recognised the need to act together as a city in the development of information communication and technology assets.

“Further than that we also saw that the development and implementation of these was likely to have a potential impact across all of the city's objectives.

“The creation of the group, the subsequent recommendations and the strategy that came out of it also gave us a focus to ensure that Dundee remained proactive in technological development and therefore more able to compete for opportunities which the new knowledge economy offered.”

In order to get under the skin of the issues the digital age threw up, Dundee City Council became involved in a number of groups at an international, national and local level as a lead partner on behalf of the city. These included being a founder member of the Global Digital Cities Network.

Continued Councillor Morrow, “Each of the cities had expressed a desire to use the opportunities which the digital economy offered them.

“Now expanded to encompass 11 cities, drawn from China, Korea, Australia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, the network meets once a year.

“In 2007 Dundee was the host and the members exchanged experiences, discussed their progress and looked at the current challenges we all face.

“Bringing together local politicians, officials and academics involved in knowledge sector industries and research in the GDCN has proved an effective formula for ensuring everyone is aware of the challenges and opportunities the new digital world offers.”

Dundee City Council was also a founding partner of the Ecity project, which in 2003 undertook the first ecity indexing exercise. It used a scoring system to position a city on a range of factors and against specific themes which include e-business, e-government, e-community and e-learning.

The results revealed a clear need to ensure that the process was opened up to anyone in the area who was concerned or had an interest in the digital issues and assets of the city.

It also led to the creation of a first set of recommendations, one of the which was to raise awareness of the issues and bring the wider community together to help to refine the strategy.

Within two years around 100 delegates from across the public, private and academic sectors had been invited to help promote the initiative.

They were sent an online survey to help build a picture of the digitally-related projects they were involved in, which grew into an online store of the city's activities. A summary of the findings was circulated to share information and help with effective networking.

The exercise also had the spin off benefit that a benchmark was set from which future progress could be gauged.

Now in 2008 Dundee has a best-in-class, city-wide technical infrastructure to support on the move connection, and it's fast with high bandwith. Add to that a growing level of new creative applications for this free flowing of information.

Councillor Morrow said, “We firmly believe that by following this strategy Dundee will have a better than average chance of attracting and keeping the new 21st century entrepreneurs and taking full advantage of the information age.

“It is the same as having an energy plant or main transport link a hundred years ago: a first class broadband infrastructure and collaborative creative community is a fundamental economic advantage.”

Put another way, the well-established computer games industry in Dundee would find creating the next Grand Theft Auto, Lemmings or Crackdown impossible without the technology to bounce huge files to Los Angeles or Seoul.

Keeping an eye on the strategy and its progress, updating the store of activities and looking for mutual areas of interest has become the task of the Digital Observatory.

It brings together staff from the universities, public and private sectors to help Dundee push itself further into the worldwide spotlight as one of the most modern digital cities on the planet.

But in the fast-paced arena of technology, development never stops so the Digital Observatory is tasked with building a collaborative project that will deliver a world-class broadband wireless technical infrastructure for the city, helping to establish collaborative creative communities that will use the capability of the new infrastructure and spreading the word about the digital initiatives from Dundee and around the world to stimulate more new ideas and help people make connections with what is going on.

By its very nature, the work never stops – which means that the Digital Observatory will be keeping an eye on Dundee's technology and how it is used for many years to come.