Bianca Wylie and Sean McDonald We’re months into a pandemic and governments around the world are at different stages of their learning and response. Canadian governments, having failed as many others did, on containment of the virus are now faced with a different kind of policy landscape — one that…

Normally when we convey open-ended power over public spaces and policies, we do so to candidates through democratic election. In the Sidewalk Toronto case, through an open-ended request for proposal, that power may be offered to Sidewalk Labs via procurement. But Sidewalk Labs is a company, not a candidate. When…

“In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only” — Dickens As the tech policy world watches the City of Toronto react to the public…

Monday, Waterfront Toronto publicly released Sidewalk Labs’ much-anticipated Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP)— essentially, their smart city proposal for Quayside. There are already, and hopefully there will be many more, hot takes on the deal. …

A newsletter on states, markets, and their digital intersection by Sean McDonald and An Xiao Mina MEMES TO MOVEMENTS LAUNCH Editor’s Note: An wrote a book! We’re biased, but it’s objectively great and that’s how the internets work now. Also, lots of people who aren’t affiliated with this newsletter think it’s great. But don’t…

DigitalPolitik is a twice-monthly newsletter on states, markets, and their digital intersection. We started calling the phenomenon #digitalpolitik (dig-E-tahl-pol-E-tique), as a shorthand for the global politics of digitization. …

Yesterday, Sidewalk Labs proposed using a Civic Data Trust as a governance vehicle to manage data collection and use in its smart city development project in Quayside. It’s the largest scale proposal of the Civic Data Trust model to date, and it comes in the midst of a tense political…

Advocates, communities, and vulnerable populations are starting to use data trusts to build a new form of activism. — Nearly every day, there are new headlines about commercial services, data breaches, and security flaws that put vulnerable groups and individuals in harms way. …

A job description for your newest C-Suite hire. — If 2018 has taught us anything, it’s the importance and complexity of managing data. We’ve gone from focusing on the efficiency of digitization to realizing that data raises a host of financial, ethical, technical, political, commercial, security, legal, privacy, jurisdictional, administrative and participation questions, among others. Each set of those…