Sidewalk Toronto and Digital Governance Innovation
Toronto is quickly becoming a world leader in emerging technologies, from its leading research capacities in artificial intelligence to its plethora of blockchain startups, which is cause for much celebration. Beyond the city’s excellent universities, high human capital, and cosmopolitan environment, the pro-innovation priorities of policy makers have helped Toronto develop and attract investment. The Sidewalk Toronto project to develop the Quayside, a 12-acre developments site by Toronto’s eastern waterfront, stands out as highlighting the government’s role in pushing the city forward.
The project, a public-private partnership between Waterfront Toronto, a consortium of municipal, provincial, and federal governments and Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, looks to further accelerate Toronto’s growth into a global innovation hub. Sidewalk Toronto will soon release its Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), and a focus on governance innovation needs to accompany the project’s priority for urban innovation. The outsized role played by the city in global innovation means that the digital mechanism designs taken in this project will have effects far beyond the Quayside. It is a responsibility for policy makers to embrace forward thinking design principles to transform Toronto into a model for digital governance.
To date, much of the discussion has focussed on the development’s environmental sustainability, housing affordability, and transportation, but anxiety has developed around the lack of clarity surrounding the project’s data governance protocols. As public trust in private use of data is declining, ensuring innovative mechanism designs that provide residents with security and privacy are of chief priority. The designers of Sidewalk Toronto’s data governance protocols would do well to take seriously the work of Glen Weyl and Eric Posner in Radical Markets and adopt the model of Data as Labour.
Proposed Governance Mechanisms
Sidewalk Labs has released assurances that neither it, nor any Alphabet owned company such as Google, will have priority over the data collected through the urban environment. They have stated that “no one has a right to own information collected from Quayside’s physical environment “, and have instead called for the creation of an independent entity, referred to as a Civic Data Trust, to manage the urban data in the public interest. This approach is meant to balance the needs of the public, who desire a fair, open, and competitive landscape that grants nobody a monopoly power over their data, and the needs of the companies operating in the Quayside to leverage the data collected to ensure constant improvement.
The access to this urban data, which through the Civic Data Trust would be free and publicly available, is vital for the vision of urban innovation Sidewalk Labs has proposed. Leveraging this data would help speed up traffic, enable more efficient energy consumption, and respond to changing weather conditions. The role of the Civic Data Trust would be to ensure that any entity using the data would meet strict privacy principles and that they abide by responsible use criteria, meaning that they use the data collected only for those purposes for which they have expressly stated. While this proposal reveals a serious commitment to data privacy and security, it leaves much to be desired.
The primary concerns that surround such an approach to data governance are funding and incentives. First, it has yet to be made clear how such a Civic Data Trust would support itself if the data is to be freely accessed. If it is to be funded publicly, how can the public receive some of the value of the data they have generated? One of the major concerns of the digital economy is the increasing inequality enabled by digital firms with low costs and high profit margins. By handing out this data for free, the digital firms leveraging the large data set are in effect receiving a subsidy.
Second, it is difficult to ensure that those governing the Civic Data Trust are actually acting in the public interest. While the move to make the organisation independent is meant to free it from the profit motives that guide private corporations, it is not obvious that the motives of non-profits or publicly administered agencies are inherently more civic minded. The public accountability of the Civic Data Trust is intimately tied to both its funding and its decision-making structure, and present complex governance challenges.
Data as Labour
These concerns raised by the governance model currently being discussed do not mean that it is entirely problematic. Philosophically, the issues in the proposal arise from the commitment to public stewardship of unowned data, a view that neglects the importance of the users of Quayside’s urban environment in generating that resource. Giving control to the residents and retailers that would occupy the Quayside and create the data being used would provide a more sustainable data governance model.
This would mean reimagining the Civic Data Trust as not a steward of unowned data, but rather something closer to a digital labour union. In effect, those living and working in the Quayside neighbourhood are creating all of the urban data that is to be governed. This act of creation by interacting with each other and the physical environment is a form of labour, where the data they make serves as an input in further production processes. Acknowledging this contribution would create a more cohesive social environment in the Quayside, moving from a model unowned to collectively owned data.
Sidewalk Toronto has already made de-identification and aggregation core criteria’s of its data policy to maximise privacy, which are essential steps in collective control over urban data. Having data in this form would enable a Civic Data Union to sell the data to companies and public entities looking to use it, rather than giving it away for free. This would resolve both the issues of funding and incentives. Not only would the organisation be able to support itself through its earnings, but its collective ownership principles would require it to return any “profits” equitably to those in the Quayside. By providing value back to the public, there are clearer incentives to look out for their interests. In addition, by the public becoming more aware of the value of their data, greater investment into maintaining and developing their neighbourhood would be incentivised, helping promote a flourishing community.
The academic work on data as labour is still fairly new, but it has already made significant impact on debates in digital public policy. It has, as of yet, not had practical implementation at sufficient scale. The Sidewalk Toronto project would be an ideal testbed for such a policy that seeks to support the governments core ambitions of “sustainability, resilience, and urban innovation”. If the Data as Labour approach is adopted, Toronto can be not only a technological leader, but the hub for digital governance innovation as well.
