Data for Society Hub: Getting Started on a Major Project
Written by Pascal Brissette, Project Director*
Une version française de ce billet a été publiée ici.
When it was created in 2012, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM) had the idea of creating an open platform through which Montréal scholars, the municipal administration, and local organizations could exchange and cross-reference information (data, knowledge, corpora) in order to improve their understanding of targeted issues related to Montréal (demographics, history, territory, culture, etc). The model from which we drew inspiration was that proposed by the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI). However, the lack of resources and expertise at this stage of the Centre’s development forced us to put our project on hold. In 2017, following ongoing discussions with the McConnell Foundation Professor of Practice at CIRM Gorka Espiau and a meeting with technology consultant Luc Véronneau, we relaunched this project with the hope that it could offer a tool for understanding and interpreting collective issues and narratives in support of theories of social transformation (Klein et al.).
This model was presented in Donostia/San Sebastián in 2019 and close links were established with the Agirre Lehendakaria Centre, which also wished to develop such a tool for understanding the collective narratives of the Arrasate/Mondragón Valley. At that point, this tool, which we called the Observatory of Montréal’s Narratives, remained in the blueprint stage. For it to become reality, we needed to bring together a team of partners willing to work with us to better define the functions and processes as well as the legal, technological, and governance aspects of this common platform. This was made possible through Infrastructure Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge, a major national competition won by Montréal in May 2019. Our winning entry involved a range of partners operating under various “hubs” (food, governance, mobility, Indigenous data, social data).
Over the next four years, CIRM will work with its partners from Montréal in Common, especially those of the Data for Society Hub (DSH) — Centraide of Greater Montréal, Montréal — Métropole en santé, the Regional Director of Public Health, the Department of Diversity and Social Inclusion of the City of Montréal — to implement this analytical and social intelligence tool, which will be powered by our partners’ research and data. This presents a significant challenge. It involves issues of law, ethics, technology, methodologies, inter-organizational governance and data management; it supposes the development of processes for data exchange, analysis, and visualization. Most importantly, it requires the commitment of several actors and organizations, which are already under great pressure due to the ongoing pandemic, to a relatively lengthy creative process. The DSH blog aims to provide a place for our partners, as well as any citizen wishing to follow the work of our team, to discuss the questions we raise, the obstacles we encounter, and the solutions we consider. Ideas will be shared, models to adopt or adapt will be discussed. The goal is to make our process as transparent and open as possible and to encourage new collaborations.
CIRM, which coordinates the work of the DSH, will post a regular basis. Among others, we will read contributions by Ana Branducescu (current McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM), Luc Véronneau (Technology Consultant), Audray Fontaine (Knowledge Mobilization Coordinator), Pascal Brissette (Scientific Director) and research assistants working on the project, including Lisa Teichmann, Julien Vallières, and Alexia Wildhaber-Riley. Partners of the DSH and Montréal in Common, as well as national and international project collaborators, will also be invited to make publications.
This post is the sole responsibility of its author.
*Translation: Julie Levasseur; translation editing: Karolina Roman
