This talk will focus on recent developments on the use of Big Data for urban planning, policy and business innovations. Examples of recent work in this area will be given. The importance of Open Data initiatives and open source tools and technologies will be discussed, as well as emerging informal networks of urban data infomediaries and civic hackers who are likely to play a transformative role in urban informatics. The value that citizens can bring through Information and Communications Technologies in cities of the future will be discussed with examples.

The Cities Learning Together conference is approaching rapidly. The European Union Centre at RMIT, PASCAL and the Hong Kong Institute of Education are very pleased to invite your participation. All the elements are now in place for an exciting and stimulating experience in Hong Kong in November.

A great deal of work has been done so far by many people and our conference partners: ASPBAE, ICAE , CITYNET, PRIA, EAFAE, APUCEN, and DVV (see details in attached booklet).

To considerable media interest, the OECD published the early findings from the PIAAC survey of adult competences yesterday 8th October.  The report Skilled for Life? Key findings from the Survey of Adult Skills is featured below and there is also a SlideShare presentation from the launch by Andreas Schleicher.

Three years after receiving an $11 million grant from the European Union, the city of Santander in northern Spain has transformed itself into a prototype "smart city" that has attracted delegations from China and the US as well as from Google and Microsoft. Its 36-square-kilometer area is studded with 10,000 sensors that deliver data about everything from parking space availability to dumpster capacity to streetlight luminosity. Residents and officials can access the data through their mobile phones or tablets.

Tom Nesbit and Michael Welton have recently edited the book, "Adult Education and Learning in a Precarious Age: The Hamburg Declaration Revisited", in which various international scholars critically assess how far the visionary statements of the Hamburg Declaration have been advanced and implemented. They review the recent development of the 10 themes of the Agenda for the Future, explore their local and global achievements through considering the results of the 2009 CONFINTEA VI conference and other related policy developments, and outline what is still necessary to realize the Declaration’s goals.