Our smart neighborhood Communities

What are Smart Communities?

As the European Community indicates, Smart Communities aim to achieve the well-being of their people by offering digitally enabled services that contribute to a better quality of life.

Although the concept of communities used by the European Community refers to communities that are broader than cities, made up of people who have something in common, we treat them as our Neighbourhood Communities, a more restricted concept and usually smaller in size, made up of a set of homes that share some common services and where part of the lives of their neighbours takes place.

Thus, for us the concept of Smart Communities applies to Communities of owners that use technology for the greater well-being of its neighbors. Specifically, our communities use technology for these purposes:

• Improve Communication: allow your neighbors to communicate better with each other, maintaining their privacy and participating more actively in the life of the Community.
• Improve your management: allow your neighbors to carry out procedures or processes of the Community itself autonomously, at any time and without physical presence.
• Achieve a safe space: offer solutions that allow improving the security of the Community through access control technology, sensors and surveillance that work in an integrated way, both in the Community and in the different homes that make it up.
• Be efficient: use electronic and technological systems that provide savings in the use of energy and resources for its operation.
• Be sustainable: allow the reuse of resources, the use of renewable energy sources and the

Smart Neighborhood Communities

At Onzane, our vision of Smart Neighborhood Communities involves offering all the necessary tools to achieve these previous objectives. Our Onzane application is currently used to improve the communication and management of Homeowners' Communities, but our goal is to achieve a global application that also allows us to achieve a safe, efficient and sustainable space within a Community.

At Onzane, we have developed a set of functionalities, along with a strategy and calendar that allows us to achieve this. We believe that the correct use of technology can only bring benefits to residents, and therefore we are working together with some Communities of Neighbours, Property Administrations and other providers to do so in a comprehensive manner for the entire Community: common areas, private homes and surroundings.

That is why, below we describe the strategy that Onzane is going to implement, with the sole objective of serving as a technological base for the creation of smart Communities of Neighbours:

• Development of communication features: We will equip our Onzane app with more communication features, such as group messaging and chat systems, automatic translation systems, document search and reading systems, voice recognition systems, and the use of artificial intelligence technology. Although we have part of these services already covered, we think that we need to evolve and improve them at the same pace as technology advances.
• Development of management features: With the main objective of carrying out virtual neighborhood meetings with legal validity, we will add other improvements that allow the synchronization of information with accounting and financial systems, the improvement in the performance of digital procedures, the control and management of tasks, the integration with ERP software for property managers and the digital signature of documents. We have already started working on many of these issues that will soon generate new functionalities.
• Integration of electronic systems: We will create new electronic systems that allow native integration with Onzane software so that they can be deployed especially in Neighborhood Communities with the casuistry that they incorporate. In addition, we will develop systems dedicated to improving security, such as sensors, alarms and video surveillance, which are natively integrated with Onzane. We have already started to work on this objective and we will soon be able to tell you more news.
• Development of an IoT platform: We are developing the first IoT platform in the world specialized in Neighborhood Communities, which allows the management and collection of information through sensors for the preparation of reports and machine learning on issues such as energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. This is something that we are pioneers in Onzane, but we believe that it will be the basis for improving the day-to-day life of the Communities in an automated way.

In short, we want you to be able to see that our vision regarding the Communities of neighbors goes beyond a simple mobile app, and involves a software development strategy, hardware and integrated and specialized services in the Communities of neighbors, to which we owe our existence. We believe that better Communities are possible and in a vision of them as living ecosystems that need greater specialization and focus than they have had until now.

Here in our blog we will be covering all the issues related to the evolution of this strategy, as well as any other issue related to the world of the Communities of neighbors, which in the near future we are sure will really be smart Communities of neighbors.