As a follow-on to the Smart America Challenge, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with US Ignite, is launching the Global City Teams Challenge to advance the deployment of Internet of Things technologies within a smart city or community.  NIST hopes that the Challenge will encourage collaboration and the development of standards so that communities can benefit from the experience of others to improve efficiency and lower costs.  From the call,

The Challenge will:

• Facilitate partnerships and interconnections among city and community planners and project managers so they can identify common issues
• Facilitate partnerships and interconnections among technology innovators/providers so that they form teams around specific issues such as transportation, disaster response, energy, healthcare, environment, others, or any combination of the above
• Facilitate partnerships between the cities/communities and innovators/providers through “Action Clusters” that will bring together cities and innovators around specific issues to jointly identify solutions that are scalable and reproducible
• Give participants the chance to contribute to the development of the NIST Smart Cities Framework by addressing standards and measurement challenges in deploying IoT and CPS that will serve as the basis for framework
• Give participants the chance to contribute to an IoT Global Connectivity Fabric Strategy of architectures and guidelines for interconnected “systems of systems” and a common data exchange/data analytics model for large scale IoT deployments

You can learn more and participate in the challenge by signing up here.  There will be a kickoff event at NIST September 29-30, 2014.  You can register for the kickoff and learn about the webcast of the kickoff, if you are unable to attend here.  You must register to attend by September 22, 2014.