Johns Creek Wins Amazon's 'City On A Cloud' Challenge

JOHNS CREEK, GA — The city of Johns Creek was crowned the winner of the Best Practice Award for Amazon's City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge.

The award recognizes the city’s development of a municipal Amazon Alexa skill, which leverages Johns Creek’s open data portal (DataHub). Winners were announced Wednesday at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.

Johns Creek is the first city in the world to use open data with Amazon Alexa, which pulls information from its website and DataHub to answer users’ questions.

Johns Creek is the first city in the world to use open data with Amazon Alexa, which pulls information from the city's website and DataHub to answer users' questions. This new Alexa skill makes key data about the city's operations more accessible to citizens through the skill and Alexa's natural language question-answer workflow.

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By simply asking the "city of Johns Creek" skill, users can find out information such as where police and fire activity has occurred, what the current traffic conditions are, and even learn more about the zoning is of any property in Johns Creek.

The City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge recognizes local and regional governments and public and private schools and districts as "hubs of innovation" in four categories: Best Practices, Partners in Innovation, Dream Big, and We Power Tech. Winners will receive AWS promotional credit to start or continue their projects, the website adds.

Image via city of Johns Creek