Open Smart Cities in Canada V1.0 Guide

Editor's Notes

• #2 Jean-Noe Hello everyone, my name is Jean-Noé Landry, and I'm the Executive Director of OpenNorth. Welcome to 3rd webinar of OpenNorth's Open Smart Cities in Canada project. A few preliminary announcements before we get started:  1. this webinar will be delivered in English and French separately 2. the French webinar will take place on April 25, at 1230 PM to 130 PM. 3. to ask a question during the today's presentation, type them in the Q&A panel. Simply click the Q&A button located at the top left corner of the presentation screen.  4. questions will be answered at the end of the presentation. 5. finally, we would like to thank Geothink for providing the hosting services used for this webinar.
• #3 Jean-Noe  In this webinar we will provide you: with a brief summary of what we discussed in Webinars 1 & 2, a little context about smart cities in Canada, and then introduce you to what we understand an Open Smart City as well as Version 1.0 of our Guide. Your presenters today will be: Rachel Bloom, OpenNorth Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
• #4 Jean-Noe To provide a bit of context, Open North is…
• #5 Jean-Noe The Open Smart Cities in Canada project was funded by…
• #6 Jean-Noe Switches to Rachel
• #7 Rachel In the first webinar we presented the results of the e-scan where we identified smart city makers such a vendors, think tanks, consulting firms, standards and many others. We also identified the main components of most smart cities and some of these are smart mobility, smart economy, smart infrastructure and so on. We also shared the findings from our smart city case studies for the cities of Edmonton, Guelph, Montreal and Ottawa, where we focused on governance, open data, geospatial data and procurement.
• #8 Rachel In the second webinar we examined related openness and digital practices in government at all levels in Canada and recommended that concepts of openness and data management be mapped onto the smart city, and that there should be more collaboration between institutions to ensure that smart cities build upon and are integrated with pre-existing practices. We also began to showcase some of the best practices we observed in our 4 cities and two provincial collaborators and from our examination of a selection of international best practices.
• #9 Rachel switches over to Jean-Noe
• #10 Jean-Noe The Open Smart Cities and the V 1.0 of the guide which we are releasing today, closely coincides with the submissions of the proposals to the Infrastructure Canada Smart City Challenge. We were very happy to see in the Challenge the call for engagement and for openness and we hope that this guide will help shape the adoption of openness principles and practices for those who win the challenge. Best of luck!
• #11 Jean-Noe As you will see, the V 1.0 of the Open Smart Cities Guide is very different than the PPP Sidewalk Toronto project being developed by Sidewalk Labs a US company owned by Google’s holding company Alphabet Inc. and Waterfront Toronto a corporation created by the Federal Government, The Province of Ontario and The City of Toronto. The Sidewalk Toronto project is significant because of its closed nature, a lack of transparency, the outsourcing to US corporations of the roll out of large government technology. Shortcomings with this approach have been demonstrated with the IBM’s and PwCs (Price Water Cooper) Phoenix experience. Sidewalk raises very problematic issues related to data sovereignty and residency issues in the call for tender, the lack of public consultation on the design of the digital architecture of the project and the lack of contractual transparency and accountability. Discussion about how to upgrade an entire city’s hardware and software when it becomes obsolete or is breached by hackers also isn’t getting the attention it deserves.  We need address Canadian territorial autonomy when an entire section of a city becomes governed by a corporation whose head office and servers are outside of Canada. Who are the governors in that context?
• #12 Jean-Noe switches over to Tracey
• #13 Tracey The Open Smart City Definition and the guidelines are informed by research and analysis and here you have links to the outputs related to this project.
• #14 Tracey Before we dive into the guide, we want to remind you that most smart cities are framed by what we call “shapers” who are primarily from industry, vendors, consulting firms, private and government led alliances, but also standards organizations, and indicator systems developed by consulting firms and to a lesser extent civil society organizations and academia. In addition, we often saw metaphors such as the City as A Platform, and the city in a box or running the city from the palm of your hands or from your iphone. Which seems to over simplify the complexity of cities.
• #15 Tracey We also want to foreground that smart cities are a large socio-technological IoT application, and while they are not framed as such it is important to think of the many devices being installed in the environment and plugged into a large urban platform. With IoT and smart cities, we rarely see in the more technologically enthusiastic literature issues such as privacy, cybersecurity, and/or how technology intended for one purpose may suddenly be used for something else such as surveillance and dataveillance, this a process called mission creep. We therefore suggest that city official and governments consider these issues at the start.
• #16 Tracey – For the purpose of our study, we assumed that data and technology are considered as more than the unique arrangement of objective and politically neutral facts & things & that these do not exist independently of ideas, techniques, technologies, systems, people and contexts regardless of them being presented in that way.
• #17 Tracey To define an open smart city, we needed a baseline definition of what a city is. We applied the following definition of a city recognizing its limitations.
• #18 Tracey; We then referred to the literature on smart cities, and we developed case studies, to better understand the discourse and the practice of current smart cities and based on those findings we observed that contemporary smart cities are more analogous to what is known as data and networked urbanism whereby cities are essentially: “[technologically] instrumented and networked, [with] systems [that are] interlinked and integrated, and [where] vast troves of big urban data are being generated [by sensors] and used to manage and control urban life in real-time”. Public administrators and elected officials invest in smart city technologies and data analytical systems to inform how to innovatively, economically, efficiently and objectively run and manage the cities they govern. Predominately, a smart city is about quantifying and managing infrastructure, mobility, business and online government services and a focus oriented toward technological solutionism.
• #19 Tracey We also examined the literature and practices related to openness to come to what we understand what an open smart city might be. We refined this definition, we consulted experts, refined it again, and we took it out for a few test drives in public forums. We will now proceed to define what we think an Open Smart City is, and we will break it down into 5 themes and we hope to hear your thoughts about this during and after the webinar in the Q & A. First: In an Open Smart City, residents, civil society, academics, and the private sector collaborate with public officials to mobilize data and technologies when warranted in an ethical, accountable and transparent way to govern the city as a fair, viable and liveable commons and balance economic development, social progress and environmental responsibility.
• #20 Tracey The definition is further expanded along the following 5 themes starting with governance. Governance Engagement Data & Technology Data Governance Effective and value-based smart cities
• #21 Tracey
• #22 Tracey The UN Habitat for a Better Urban Future, defines governance in laypersons terms “as the many ways that institutions and individuals organize the day-to-day management of a city, and the processes used for effectively realizing the short term and long-term agenda of a city’s development. Urban governance [in a way] is the software that enables the urban hardware to function”. Some of the resources that we have compiled here emphasize different aspects of governance for example The Open Government Partnership and the Open Data Charter are well established governance practices that can be mapped onto open smart cities and be part of strategies. The Province of Quebec has created a useful Smart Cities for the Public Good guide with ethical questions and checklists to aid decision makers And the City of Barcelona as member of the Electronics Watch project factors in the full production cycle of technology and data when they procure to mitigate human rights abuses in factories and environmental waste. The Ontario Smart Grid has taken a team based approach to managing the third party resale of data while the Grid is a multi-jurisdictional process managed by a very complex governance structure which we hope you will read more about in the guide and in the Assessment Report. The City of Chicago formed a mayor’s advisory council to bridge the digital divide with its smart city While Barcelona has developed a whistle blowing platform called DECIDIM where citizens can report corruption and track projects and proposals The City of New York has a Digital Playbook which aim to make government simple, welcoming all residents, and foster trust And like Barcelona, je fais MTL is a way for residents to keep track of smart city projects also the City has adopted the Open Contracting Data Standard to openly report what it procures and includes a way to visualize procurement data. In this guide we structured all of these resources and more into the following categories Ethical Governance, Governance Structures and Participation, Cooperative and Multi-jurisdictional Governance, Accountable Governance, Transparent Governance and Cooperative Governance. We look forward to your suggestions in the Q & A. 
• #24 Rachel Secondly, ….
• #25 Rachel In terms of meaningful participation, the IAP2 public participation spectrum and values are tools to assess the quality of public engagement and to self assess approaches. The cities of Guelph and Edmonton plan to include citizen representation on their smart city governance committees. We have observed meaningful collaboration in Montreal via the co-creation of projects and these can be seen in Montreal’s smart city action plan. In addition, the city of Guelph has collected via their customer relationship management software requests for technologies from the public that were then incorporated into their RFPs. Responsiveness has been observed through digital services initiatives and innovations. The civic user test (CUT) group in Chicago consulted resident volunteers on the design of digital services and their methodology. Also, standards such as the Open311 API are being deployed by cities in Canada to enable more responsive governance and the Open Data standards directory provides a centralized inventory of open data standards. TRUST Transparency and broader debate are a prerequisite for building public trust. The co-creating of governance and privacy guidelines in the Chicago urban sensing project the Array of Things has provided more transparency and public participation in decision making. While in Canada Tech Reset is promoting critical debate and calling for more transparency to build trust so that public interests will be protected and to mitigate mission creep in Sidewalk Toronto. CRITICAL THINKING has been seen in the case of the Programmable City project, which actively works with decision makers of Smart Dublin to translate research into policy interventions and affect the thinking and work of public sector officials and bodies. Fair and JUST: Indicator systems for cities, whether they are smart, resilient, or sustainable, should recognized that conflict and inequality are inherent characteristics of any city. Therefore, to inform progress and missions of open smart cities, indicators that value subjective well being such as the OECD measures and that are reflective of social advocacy emergent from conflict should be used to supplement for quantitative/fact based methods. Inclusive an Informed: There are initiatives to increase and improve access to digital literacy, skills, and knowledge among women, people with physical disabilities, and low income residents. Barcelona’s Digital City operationalizes gender equity and emphasizes increasing the number of women in science and technology. The G3ICT and the Smart Cities for All initiative ensure that smart cities include people with physical disabilities. Also, Connect Chicago runs smart health centers in low income areas that have Health IT Navigators to help local residents connect to their personal information and to find reliable resources. Now I will pass it over to Tracey 
• #27 Tracey
• #28 Tracey Open smart cities enable ethical, transparent, accountable, and cooperative models of governance and meaningful civic engagement and some of these properties can be embodied in the design of technologies, processes and data practices. The following are examples of how these are applied in real terms. 1. For example The NYC guidelines on IoT deployment include privacy & transparency, infrastructure, security, and operations & sustainability. 2. Again the 3Gict is mentioned as it includes tools and techniques for smart City and Digital Inclusion programs. 3. the Right to Repair Association lobbies for the right to fix and for the ability to query AI, software and hardware. 4. The City of Helsinki’s open APIs ecosystem, CitySDK, ensures that data about public information are open and this is accompanied by a Harmonized Smart City APIs “Cookbook” 5. The UK Government’s Digital Service Standard also specifies that new source code be open and publishes an Open Source Procurement Toolkit. The City of Guelph for example cites the Toolkit in their Open Government Action Plan. In addition it also specifies the use of open standards and common platforms for public services and has published an open standards principles guide. 6. In addition, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) published a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on open source and licenses. Tool. 7. While Mayor's Office of Data Analytics in NY has an Open Analytics Library, to showcase and educate the public about how agencies use data and open source software and this is accompanied by project management guidelines all posted on GitHub. 8. The ThingsNetwork on the other hand is a global open source and decentralized approach to building an IoT network where members contribute source code, place a gateway on the console, and plug and play with their applications. 9. The Smart and Digital City Strategy for the city of Montreal includes open, interoperable, and technological architecture as goals and this is part of smart city procurement. 11. The Getting Smarter about Smart Cities report published by the Government of Ireland includes privacy and security recommendations. 13. In Canada right now a Multistakeholder Process: for Enhancing IoT Security is ongoing and has published useful resources related to vulnerabilities, standards, policies, and etc. 14. the Reduction of Harm and Bias in automated processes is key, and The New York City’s Council has passed a bill to establish a task force to make recommendations to make software uses more transparent especially when it comes to automated decision-making. 15. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will legislate a right to explanation to improve transparency about decision-making, access, and algorithms. 16. While organizations like the Community Control Over Police Surveillance (COPS) a civil liberties partnership aims to ensure that a regulated process is in place to examine automated programs that target and police people in 20 US cities. 17 -18. The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT/ML) coordinates the work of critical scholars and publishes principles for accountable algorithms and a social impact statement for algorithms. 19. Local and Sustainable Procurement is a way to support local companies in lieu of only relying on large multinationals located outside of Canada. The Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Procurement Tool, includes strategies to support local procurement and the production cycle. 21. The Guelph’s Civic Accelerator Program also supports local suppliers for innovative solutions to address city’s business needs. 22. Finally, while Sustainability is often a goal the procurement of millions of IOT does not align with those smart city goals and the full production cycle of technology is rarely taken into. As discussed earlier e-Watch is an example while the City of Seoul Sharing City initiative is a consumption reduction process. The guide these examples and more and are organized under the headings of: Fit for Purpose Repaired and Queried Open Source Open Standards Cybersecurity and Data Security Reduction of Harm and Bias Local Procurement
• #30 Rachel The fourth characteristic concerns data governance, It states that,
• #31 Rachel Data management considers the full data lifecycle, from collection to preservation, and this includes technologies, source code, sensors and etc. The geomatics community and scientists have been using remote and sensor-based technologies, situationally aware analytics, augmented reality and 3D visualization and algorithms to model urban and environmental systems. Some geomatics and science based actors include Centre for Open Science, Canada’s Spatial Data Infrastructure, Arctic SDI, Ocean Networks Canada, and OGC. In terms of residency, we have seen concerns raised about outsourcing e-communications outside national boundaries ( see the ‘Seeing Through the Cloud report’) and also have observed the way that Estonia’s government is innovatively retaining control of their crucial data stored abroad via the establishment of a data embassy. Open by default is a principle specified in the International Open Data Charter and Open Knowledge International provides a go to definition for open data. Other related organizations in Canada are the Open Data Institute and powered by data. Data security is an important consideration for open smart cities which Tracey has discussed. In addition, data privacy is another commonly raised concern and is linked to security. There are numerous resources and actors working on promoting privacy by design and researching privacy implications raised by smart cities. This include the future of privacy forum, which has a repository of smart city resources on privacy, the surveillance studies centre at Queens University, and Privacy Analytics Inc. who have advised on de-indentifying smart meter data in Ontario. Finally, models and technologies are emerging that aim to grant people access and authority over their personal data and with whom they are shared. This includes Finland’s MyData model, Estonia’s X-road interoperability layer, and the green button initiative adopted by Ontario’s Ministry of Energy. 
• #33 Tracey
• #34 Tracey Cities are faced with a number of complex socio economic issues that require more than technological solutionist approaches to their resolution and there is a concern that the data and networked urbanism type of smart city will not focus on these. In an open smart city, issues such as homelessness, aboriginal people living in urban areas, accessibility, refugee settlement and food security are but some of the systemic issues that should not be ignored because there is not IoT application that will fix these and smart and innovation social processes are required and should be valued in order to resolve issues.
• #35 Tracey An open smart city then…
• #36 tracey
• #37 Tracey This Open Smart City Guide V 1.0 is not perfect, and we fully acknowledge many of its limitations, and this is why we need your help. For example: It could have been organized by smart city component, specific technologies or software stacks And we most certainly would have benefited from a more consultative process and this is especially the case when it comes to legal, cybersecurity, standards and industry expertise. Consulting residents, makers, civil liberties organizations, civic technology groups and more would also have improved this guide. And we could have taken a less institutional approach. But in this one year project, we first had to Understand what smart cities are, and then define what an Open Smart City might be, we were most certainly able to identify gaps in current data and networked urbanism approaches, and we were able to identify many useful resources , which we think is a good start and we hope you find the Guide useful and that you will help us improve and grow it.
• #38 Tracey
• #39 Tracey Please see the following resources created during the course of this 1 year project. These include: Executive Summary of a smart city E-Scan and 5 Canadian case studies A Cities Assessment Report Our V1.0 Guide The CIPPIC FAQ Webinars 1 and 2
• #40 Rachel
• #41 Rachel
• #42 Rachel