In this paper, four early career researchers discuss and reflect upon the unique research space offered by Smart City projects. We do so in an attempt to publicly reconcile some of the tensions and difficulties that we encountered while collaborating across organisational boundaries during three "Smart City" projects, which we briefly outline in the paper. We focus our discussion on four types of tensions that we encountered: motivations; accountability; participation, and; qualifying success. We believe that the tensions we encountered in our projects, and that we discuss in this paper, might be experienced similarly by other early career researchers. By sharing our tensions, raising our questions, and proposing some preliminary answers to those questions based on our experiences and reflections, we hope to provoke a discussion amongst our dg.o peers that will lead to improved future collaborations, a supportive community environment and, ultimately, smoother Smart City research projects.