We’re happy to announce that we have accepted the opportunity to sponsor the first inaugural Texas Smart Cities Summit, and will be hosting a working group session and more while we’re there. We’d also like to thank Austin CityUP, a smart city consortium of companies, organizations, and individuals collaborating to advance smart city initiatives in Texas for the chance to collaborate with them and for their invitation to the Summit.This event is going to provide a fundamental jumping point for the state of Texas, and as a result the United States, by bringing together thought leaders, policy makers, designers and developers to develop plans & priorities to accelerate smart city efforts across the state of Texas. The IOTA Foundation looks forward to assisting the organizations in understanding the role of distributed and open data in making informed decisions, and how the landscape of a smart city is a vital point for enabling that informed decision making at scale.We took the opportunity to live stream our recent event in Austin and have had outstanding local feedback as a result. One of the results of this feedback has been the overflow of requests for us to represent the progress that the IOTA protocol can enable through our integration in Smart City solutions like we’re building in Austin with the Austin Transportation Department.Jay Boisseau, Executive Director & Founder of Austin CityUP explained this correlation well when he said, “Smart city approaches allow us to use data, technology & analytics to improve the quality of life in cities for all as well as the efficiency and operations of those cities. Several Texas cities have started with smart city efforts. We are excited to host the Texas Smart Cities Summit to bring together key players from Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and beyond to share lessons, inspire people, and accelerate all of their initiatives.”If you’re in the area, please come by and say hello! For more information on the Texas Smart Cities Summit please see below.Event Details:The Texas Smart Cities SummitTuesday, May 21st, 20198:30 AM — 5:00 PM | Presentations & Forum5:00 PM — 7:00 PM | Networking & ExpoLocation:Austin Central Library710 W Cesar Chavez St Austin, TXParticipants will discuss and plan new efforts to accelerate smart cities development in Texas. Expert speakers will cover topics including: mobility, safety, sustainability, health, environmental quality, economic development, and more. The resources and plans resulting from this first Texas Smart Cities Summit will benefit cities and communities across the state.Recently, we made our announcement on our push to expand the IOTA Foundations presence with a foothold in North America. With this announcement we also mentioned that the Foundation would be hosting three meetups where Co-Founder Dominik Schiener spoke with local enterprise, community and regulatory representatives in NYC, Austin, and Chicago. The response and follow up from this has been outstanding, and we want to say thank you for all that attended the events that could be there.Texas Smart City Summit Online Details:Event URL: TexasSmartCities.orgEvent Eventbrite: https://texassmartcitiessummit2019.eventbrite.comEvent Hashtag: #TexasSmartCitiesTwitter: @TXSmartCitiesLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/texassmartcitiesFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2281853468538392Subscribe to the IOTA Newsletter to stay up to date with what the IOTA Foundation is working on! To work with the IOTA Foundation in North America you can email us at [email protected] at the Texas Smart Cities Summit was originally published in IOTA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.