Smart cities and governance – WS 09 2019

20 June 2019 | 14:00-15:30 | MISSISSIPPI | |
Consolidated programme 2019 overview

Proposals assigned to this session: ID 13, 152, 195 – list of all proposals as pdf

Session teaser

Cities are centers of innovation and creativity, but they also face great challenges such as rapid urbanization, pollution, lack of privacy and increased pressure on city services (i.e. transport). To address the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities, cities are encouraged to become ‘smart cities’. What are the relevant questions that need answering in the immediate future?

Session description

Introduction – 10 min;
The moderator will engage participants to discuss about infrastructure, technology, connectivity and data – 15-20 minutes;
The moderator will engage participants to discuss about privacy and data collection – 15-20 minutes;
The moderator will engage participants to discuss about how can we ensure the use of smart city generated data for the common good – 15-20 minutes;
Wrapping up and rapporteurs talks – 10 min.

The participants will receive from the very beginning of the session, sheets of paper with the challenges that the moderator(s) are proposing to be discussed. At the end, they will vote, according to their own views what are the most important topics to be consider for the final report.

Questions that should be answered at the end of the session:

Smart infrastructure means interconnected things. What are the major risks of a connected city and what is there to be done to lower them down?
Are the citizens aware of what data collection means? Should we be concerned by the constant surveillance?
How can data become available to researchers in e.g. mobility, health, city planning, environmental, etc.?
How to make a smooth transition/ensure the inclusion/ of those who are not computer savvies at all and are not able to be included in the community education and engagement programmes due to different factors?
What are the infrastructures that should be consider in smart cities?
Is 5G technology the most important element for smart cities?

Format

Round table.

People

Until 15 May 2019.

Please provide name and institution for all people you list here.

Focal Point

Catalin Vrabie, lecturer at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest, Romania

Organising Team (Org Team) List them here as they sign up.

Wout de Natris, De Natris Consult
Amali De Silva-Mitchell
Erklina Denja, Magnific shpk Finance Accounting
Eduard Dumitrascu
Fotjon Kosta, Coordinator of Albania IGF
Diona Kusari
Syuzan Marukhyan, UFSD/ARISC
Kristina Olausson, ETNO - European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association
Oliana Sula, University "Aleksander Moisiu" Durres/Estonian Business School

Key Participants

Martin Pot, member of AIOTI WG13 on Smart Archtecture/Smart Building (details here)
Wout de Natris, De Natris Consult (https://woutdenatris.wordpress.com/about/)
Arthur van der Wees, Arthur's Legal, Strategies & Systems, AIOTI, Future of Living, Accountability, CyberChess, CyberTrust & Zapplied (https://nl.linkedin.com/in/arthur-van-der-wees)

Key Participants are experts willing to provide their knowledge during a session – not necessarily on stage. Key Participants should contribute to the session planning process and keep statements short and punchy during the session. They will be selected and assigned by the Org Team, ensuring a stakeholder balanced dialogue also considering gender and geographical balance. Please provide short CV’s of the Key Participants involved in your session at the Wiki or link to another source.

Moderator

Catalin Vrabie, lecturer at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest, Romania (details here)
Arthur van der Wees, Arthur's Legal, Strategies & Systems, AIOTI, Future of Living, Accountability, CyberChess, CyberTrust & Zapplied (https://nl.linkedin.com/in/arthur-van-der-wees)

The moderator is the facilitator of the session at the event. Moderators are responsible for including the audience and encouraging a lively interaction among all session attendants. Please make sure the moderator takes a neutral role and can balance between all speakers. Please provide short CV of the moderator of your session at the Wiki or link to another source.

Remote Moderator

Trained remote moderators will be assigned on the spot by the EuroDIG secretariat to each session.

Reporter

Stefania Grottola, Geneva Internet Platform

The Reporter takes notes during the session and formulates 3 (max. 5) bullet points at the end of each session that:

are summarised on a slide and presented to the audience at the end of each session
relate to the particular session and to European Internet governance policy
are forward looking and propose goals and activities that can be initiated after EuroDIG (recommendations)
are in (rough) consensus with the audience

Current discussion, conference calls, schedules and minutes

See the discussion tab on the upper left side of this page. Please use this page to publish:

dates for virtual meetings or coordination calls
short summary of calls or email exchange

Please be as open and transparent as possible in order to allow others to get involved and contact you. Use the wiki not only as the place to publish results but also to summarize the discussion process.

Messages

Smart cities are not merely based on the technology involved, but also on the interaction between human beings and technology. Building on this interaction, two types of smart cities can be identified: prescriptive smart cities, doing mental harm to their citizens; and co-ordinating smart cities which stimulate people mentally by engaging them in addressing complex problems and human differences.
Smart cities are human-centric organisations and systems featured by a variety of different stakeholders, ranging from users and individuals, to the public and private sectors. Due to the interconnectivity-based nature, debates on smart cities should adopt a multistakeholder, horizontal, and multi-layered (local, regional, national, and international) approach. They should also highlight the current dichotomy between smart cities, oriented towards funding and investment goals, and digital cities, redirecting the approach toward a citizen- and human-centric one.
Smart cities represent enablers of the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). To facilitate the development of smart cities and address the related governance challenge, a multiplicity approach is required through a symbiotic combination of different stakeholders and technologies.
Some of the smart cities governance challenges include data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity. As data collection represents an important resource for smart cities, awareness should be raised in a more effective way on the amount of information that individuals – knowingly and unknowingly – provide; on the distinction between personal, non-personal, and business data; and, on the concept of data sharing for good meant to foster the maximisation of societal benefits of the technology involved. Additionally, trade secrets need to be taken into account and frameworks for mandatory data sharing by business entities should be further discussed.

Find an independent report of the session from the Geneva Internet Platform Digital Watch Observatory at https://dig.watch/sessions/smart-cities-and-governance.

Video record

https://youtu.be/P3RfZhia0C8

Transcript

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This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.

>> Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for being here after the lunch. I hope you had a good lunch.

I'm Catalin Vrabie, from Bucharest, Romania, lecturer at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration.

Together with my colleagues here, Arthur and Martin, we will try to rise up some questions, some issues, and problems that smart cities today do face, and we hope for your cooperation into this topic.

I will start by giving Arthur the floor, to give his pitch, and we'll debate. I'm asking you to be as active as possible.

Arthur.

>> Arthur: Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for being here. We have a relatively group here. Anybody from the government at this point or cities? Is it city or national governments?

>> AUDIENCE: Regional.

>> Arthur: Regional, thank you. National. National. Thank you. National. Excellence.

So from the private sector, anybody here? Good. Go ahead.

Any others? Universities? Academia?

And people I did not see hands. What are you doing? Media. Okay, thank you. Excellent.

Anybody else that wants to say a little bit, disclose where -- where? Okay. Great. You? Great.

All right. So nice group. So we talk about Smart Cities Today and Governance. This is still human controls. As you can see, I'm doing a couple of things. I'm the cofounder of the Future of Living Institutes. We'll talk more about that. And the AOTA. That was started by the European Commission a couple of years ago. They have initiated this.

Martin is here. I will talk about that later.

Again, smart cities is the topic. Smart city, the term, has been there for a long time. I'm focusing on the people and the society, and the economy. The smart city itself, we're talk about it later.

Let's see if it works. Not yet. Ah, there it is. These are the items we need to work on. We have the three themes, technical layers, communication, infrastructure. Then we focus on the personal side. You see here a strange abbreviation. You do know the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. It's not general. It's personal data, and it's not only about protection. It's good for everybody. It's been introduced and taken over by China. Australia. It's also been introduced as, let's say, inspirational in states in the U.S. Mexico also has done it before. So it's good that we are here at EuroDIG. It's not only about Europe. It's about the world.

Data sharing for goods, it's not the ITU event, but that was in the wrap-up.

So the wrap-up, we'll be done. We have about 90 minutes. Thank you.

All right. So here I go. Do I need to point to somewhere with my clicker? Do we need to point somewhere? It's not really responding too well. It's quite slow. There it is. Need to find the right place. I'm clicking much more than you can see. Can I click one more, please. Thank you.

Smart cities, of course, about connectivity and hyperconnectivity. We've been talking about Cloud computing and those things, broadbands for a while. It's still a very relevant topic. It's nice to talk about IoT and cyber systems. Don't forget about connectivity.

This is a little visual of how I think the 21st century, we're already 18% in the 21st century. 18%, we need to move faster. This is a nice visual, in my point of view. It's the combination of the real world. It's not only physical, it's cyber. As a human person, your carbon base yourself, you enter in a gateway through a cyber environment, and it could a cyberphysical environment and then you step out again. It doesn't need to be looped one way. It can be another way as well.

It is not only about algorithms or connectivity and data. It's about human beings.

We want to move to smart everything. So the question, of course, is it's all nice, and we can talk for hours, and we have done so for years on the emerging technologies and what can we do with it.

So with smart cities, what I like about it is it's getting to the society and the real economy.

This is the definition I want to work through quickly which has been discussed a couple of years. There was a large group of people, stakeholder. There's no one single definition. I have written regulations and standards and those things, so I can say it like this. What I like about this is this is generally from technical sides written, but if you read it, you can click all the way down.

So here are the elements. This is one sentence. I think it looks nicely that it says it needs to dramatically increase the pace at which we improve the sustainability of a city. This is not a call on technology. This is a call for people, for cities, for everybody.

The second one, from the mentally improve how to engage with society. This shows a classical smart city definition that is the municipality that's in charge of taking care of smart city policies and deploying it, which I think is a little bit outdated already. We'll talk about it perhaps later. This is the smart city definition that I'm working on for this discussion.

The other one applies collaborative leadership methods. We've seen the manifesto yesterday that's part of it.

What does collaboration mean? It's very difficult, but we need to work on it.

I think discipline is a nice one. This is not a single technology push. It is not a CICTO of any region or city or nation that can do this. If we talk about smart cities, there are also smart nations, like Singapore, smaller cities and countries and nations, like the will the kingdom in the Netherlands. I'm speaking there next Sunday on this topic. These are good to take into account.

And then it's a bit more technical data. Technology, sure, we're talk about it later.

I think the last one is very important. This is not about connectivity with the government towards its citizens or its voters. This is to everybody that is any city anywhere you are at any point of time. These are people of The Hague. I live in Amsterdam, whether you're a visitor for a day or a week or whatever. I think it's very important to see it's an ecosystem. It's focused on people and society. And society is not only people that live at a certain place.

With that, I try to visualize in a little more academic. You will know people process technology. You have probably learned it and seen it at University many times. I think it's wrong. I explain it to Harvard, Berkeley and universities around the world, Hong Kong, Europe. We have missed out on the data information and knowledge sites.

We are an information society. I did that in the '90s when I was graduating, and we have still not really dealt with it that well.

So I think this one is much better. Data information, knowledge -- information is instructed data. Knowledge is information you use. Data is a source to get there.

If you have four, you build a tetrahedron. You can put people in the middle. That fits nicely in the United Nations.

There's technology involved. We'll talk about it later, if you want, if it's a topic you want to discuss.

I'm able to explain this to ministers of countries. Hopefully you can do it as well. Don't make it too complicated. You have network computing, hardware devices, also sensors, the machine science, the hardware science, then you move to the algorithms, the platforms, and the services, and then, of course, the data is loading everything up.

If you want to use that concept, that structure we're using at the European Commission level, by the way, this is what we're using. Here you see an example. The municipality on the left. You add parking to it. The parking could be public owned or it's a private company. That depends, but you still want to have communication with them. You want to know whether there's a parking space. Here in Winter Park here, I only know if there's a space just crossing the corner, and I see that there's a space in the parking garage. It would be nice to know that in advance. It could say in advance, here you can go to this place, and you can park.

The other one is public transportation, a big issue anywhere in the world, here in the Hague and The Netherlands and thousand connect it with the private transportation like I did this morning. Another example is if you're charging, how do you take care of that? We're getting to bidirectional charging. If you have battery power in your car, it's a good moment to load balance the smart grid, which is part of the smart city topic. You can actually make money while not using your car. So that's a nice one as well.

There's a lot of stakeholders. I do not agree with the fact that the definition says a city is in charge, the municipality is in charge.

You're here for a conference and then moving on towards businesses, hospitals, universities, youngster schools, people that enjoy parks, and then, of course, there's municipality and a state and a province. There's a nation and a union. There are other places you have regional collaboration.

There's higher, in cyber, that's not controlled.

So you have local, regional, national, international, and basically global. This is how I think we should have looked at smart cities because with that, it's not only The Hague or Amsterdam or Barcelona that's doing this. It's a waste of taxpayer money to reinvent the wheel all the time. A lot of stakeholders are not working through all of them. Even malicious actors are part of the ecosystem. We have to understand what they want to do, what they want to try to do, and counteract that.

So this, of course, the Amazon River. It's not about the fact that it's a great place, but it looks a little bit like a brain. It's a very nice example of the upstream-downstream approach. It's not linear. We're not pumping data from A to B. We don't have linear relationships nowadays. It's about building ecosystems within ecosystems. It doesn't need to be the whole city. It can be parts of it. It can be a specific place where you want to do the public services in a private matter, et cetera. So depending on where you are, there's also private companies, like the chip companies and component companies, they are all the way upstream.

A city may, I think, generally be midstream because they will get a lot of -- you know, they need to stack the technical layers. They get a lot of data in. They absorb a lot of data, whether they want it or not, and then there's society downstream.

So we're building neural systems, not neural AI here. This is the mindset that I would like to give you for opening the floor.

Connect and collaborate, I will give an example. This is the example. I am aware it's small letters. I tried to put it on one slide. This is how the European Commission takes care of this. This is one ministry that takes care of the digital side. I call them E4 all the way down. They set up a unit of 20 people and try to figure out what we need to do.

So the AI robotics, for example, is already there as well. They're based in Luxembourg. They're in Brussels. This is a nice combination. How do you connect one ministry with your partners and colleagues? And how do you do that outside? Energy is here for the smart grids. We need to have health because most of the care and cure is done within the region or within a city, et cetera, et cetera. So this is not any more a vertical ministry that can take care of it. We need another approach.

How does the Commission add to that on the governance side and get stakeholders? They set up the innovation, and they have four topics: Research, there's a lot of research going on; ecosystems, that's broad, of course; then the standardization side, we don't make the standards. We need to figure out what they are and how they work. And then the policy side.

The good thing is we have loaded them with verticals, even though I just mentioned there are not verticals anymore. It's ecosystem thinking but in a two-dimensional picture world. It's difficult to come up with anything other than vertical.

You can see the vertical topics are not going to work all through them, but Martin will definitely talk about work group 13, for instance, which is the smart building and architecture. This is part of the city. You can see energy is part of the city, manufacturing, mobility, wearables like crowd control, but also giving services to people. I just saw a credit card company. Now you can pay with your Fitbit and garment.

You can see all these vertical items. This is not an extensive group. This is what we came up with so far. These are all included in this topic. It also makes it a bit difficult. On the other hand, I think it's good. People get a little bit confused. It means we need to think differently than perhaps we have done for so long.

The other one that I think is really important, and I hope you are, to a certain extent -- I know Barcelona is part of this. It's nice to write things on paper, but this is about trying to work it out. In small-scale pilots, in small suburbs or small parts of a town or the whole city or connecting cities without a city, as we do here, annual learning. This is about failure, failure, failure, and then you get to a success.

So small scale or large scale doesn't matter. It's about learning by doing. For instance, Slovenia, they managed the side with a lot of start-ups, with universities, with public services and with the other services.

We need to add one thing, which is, of course, you may think that smart cities are only sustainable -- of course you know them by heart. It would be nice to have non-polluted rivers and smart parks. So there's 17 out of 17. In the Hague, of course, we're very proud. We think we own it. That's what The Hague is all about. We do other things.

As I mentioned, this is not something I can do alone, you can do alone, wherever you are in the world or organization or your backgrounds. This is something we need to team up with. That's why I really like these sessions. I will open the floor right after.

So we need to team up with a diverse group of people, and I think we have a pretty diverse group of people. We want to fill the room, but, secondly, we need to work with digital means and tools. This is called multiplicity. A diverse group of people working with algorithms and machine systems and perhaps move it up to making decisions and executing on them. We're mandating machines for a long time. So this is the combination I would like to get to. This is not only for youngsters or for us but also for the elderly. They should be able to understand this as well. If they don't, we need to have means to keep them included.

So with that, I'm opening the floor. We have two mics. We're going run around. I will take this side for questions but also, of course, for concerns because we're here to try to write a report, as you know, to report on something that's interesting. I hope it has inspired you a bit. We're keen on knowing what you're thinking.

Next, let's focus for now on number two and work with two, three, and four. If you have something to talk about, data sharing, let's do it a little bit later. If you want to talk about personal data protection and accountability and those kinds of things, data processing as well, like how are you doing in Barcelona, whatever you want, best practices, things that didn't work are very interesting to hear about because that's how we learn.

One back, please. The technical layers, the communication, infrastructure, what are your thoughts on where should cities start or where should the nation start in facilitating and getting to an ecosystem that we can start doing whatever we want, any thoughts on this? Any other thoughts are welcome as well.

>> AUDIENCE: Yes. Thank you. I'm Simon from the Regional Government from Belgium. We have an investment plan in the City of Things. I think it's 4 million per year that goes into a lot of different small projects. The good thing about it, I think, is municipalities can deliver some problems that they have that they would like to solve with City of Things and sensors and algorithms and all that.

The least -- or the not good thing about it, I had a conversation with the director about it, I asked what do you do with all of these proof of concepts? He said, Well, it's available to all the leaders and municipalities on my website. I didn't think that was a good answer. So my question to all of you, also, is: How do you scale up and bring it to all the other municipalities? I would like to have information on that.

>> Very good. I have recommendations, but does anyone want to share thoughts on this, on the question? How do you take care of that? There's a lot of things that went well. There are white papers. There are the failures. Again, I like failures a lot. I'm happy to share failures as well. How would like to hear from the governance side? How would we take care of this? I know Barcelona has these things. You do as well. I will be in the city of Atlanta in U.S. this is a global challenge. It's not even a Belgium or Dutch one.

Anyone else want to go there, please?

>> Yes, thank you very much. I work for the Dutch national government. I do know one programme we have where we have an innovation budget managed by the ministry. The government can come up with challenges, so they see certain problems they have at a municipal level, and they submit them. They're in a public tender procedure and they're put out for companies to come up with solutions. And when they've, of course, gone through the procedure, they're granted an amount of money to work on that with the idea that it's not just for that one municipality or province or organization to work with, but it works for all the different municipalities. That's one thing I think we do that we only just started now. It has to prove itself.

Another thing, we're working with municipalities specifically on sensors in the public space, and we're looking at creating a -- oftentimes, the question is the data that it collects. Is that a private thing or owned by the government or the companies that are working together with the partnerships and we're not trying to create a standard agreement that municipalities can use when they work in public-private partnerships to make sure the data is managed in a responsible way and may not disappear to one company? We try to work with the different layers to make sure it can be used by everyone rather than just one trying to do it. So maybe that helps.

>> It does help. Of course, also, with the European Commission, there's projects and it's impossible to know what's happening and going on.

One of the things we do here in the Netherlands, each major city has basically focused on one specific topic that they're leading. Of course, they're not monopolizing. They're leading it. The Netherlands are doing a circular society. The Hague is security.

They need to be the place to absorb and disseminate. Everybody needs their own responsibility. It's not easy. Sharing is not easy to talk about.

>> Yeah, I think getting businesses involved is probably the most important thing I take with me. In our project, it was the programme itself that was the proof of concepts. It's very good, failures and successes, but getting companies on board is very important. Thank you.

>> Anyone else that wants to -- yeah, go ahead. Martin.

>> Martin: Maybe just one thought to share with you. I'm connected to council of Internet of Things and smart architecture. You described the characteristics of a smart city. I came up on a definition provided by Richard Senet of sociology. The prescriptive smart city that does mental harm and dumbs down its citizens. That's not my text, of course. And ordinating smart city that stimulates people mentally by engaging them in complex problems and human differences, end quote.

It's more or less, to me, an attempt to be aware of that it is about citizens we're talking about. It's not just technology. I think overall speaking, a little bit black and white, maybe, the emphasis is about technology and not about the humans. I guess we can have a little discussion about what type of technology is involved here. I've organized six conferences on Internet of Things and building environment and everything that's connected to it. What I've noticed for the last years, for the average citizen, the whole subject of Internet of Things and smart city is completely alien. They're more or less confronted with it the moment some entity, some government entity or local entity, municipality is providing some kind of service, which is still looking for a problem; but I think the core of business is what are we going to communicate the whole concept of a smart city with its citizens?

I'm curious for the comments from the rest of you.

>> Go ahead.

>> AUDIENCE: In response to your comment, I think if you want to engage with the cities especially, it should be -- it's not a pipeline. I don't know how to use the metaphor correctly. The communication between, for example, when in Barcelona, the academy, as a student, I found that it's cool, the website is nice, and many things have been done; but there's a gap in communication. So if I wanted to ask more about information beyond what is written in the website, it's not very easy to meet people from the city council. If the smart city is from the people to the people, maybe the communication started but it should not be eliminated. If we want multistakeholder -- we should not feel like there's a gap between us so when the business and the local government starts something, they are not creating something that is for their own benefit, but I don't feel we really need this because there's a concept that the smart city is for providing the better life of the citizen or is it to create a better life for the companies? Or for better control of the government so that it can -- so we don't feel suspicious, yeah, or even in -- we start to change the use of smart city. We use digital city because we feel "smart city" is too commercial, but "digital city" may be more accommodating. We don't use "smart city" anymore. We use "digital city." Thank you.

>> Thank you very much.

What are your thoughts? Your studying this for a long time already. You've written a couple of nice articles, which we've, of course, all read. It's on the website.

>> Thank you. Regarding the smart city versus digital city. I don't know how is the situation everywhere in the world, but I'm from Romania. In the region, southeastern European countries, a lot of mayors, a lot of people that are policymakers, do have the money, tend to turn smart city into -- they are not focused on the citizen but mostly on getting the European funds or whatever, which is not necessarily smart. I mean, it might be smart from a very narrow perspective, but it's more clever.

So, maybe, if we use "digital city," we'll skip the term of clever but still the problem in some countries still remains, is still there. They make investments into IT projects that are not necessarily for the citizens.

Well, if somebody is having some thoughts regarding those kinds of issues, please.

>> AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Antonio. I come from the southwest of Spain, a very rural area. At the moment, there is a project starting there, which is the smart villages, so smart towns. I am coordinating the digital literacy programme. We have decided to try to stop and get people living in very small communities to design their own smart village. So, first, they have to understand what a sensor is. They have to understand how this data will be managed. So they are now -- I would like to ask you, also, if you know this flyware ( phonetic ) platform. We are now questioning how to start this project in very small towns, and we're just talking about pedestrian ways and the way that we will manage the energy or the way we will -- I don't know -- measure the air quality or the water quality or this kind of information.

So since we are not in a hurry and were now in the process of experimenting, I think it's very interesting, also because we work in the field of digital inclusion. Sometimes what we think is digital inclusion is not about providing digital skills. It's about reflecting why do we need those digital skills. And then we will find a way to acquire them.

So I wanted to share this with you, this concept of smart villages or digital villages and the process of the people who live there.

>> Yeah. Excellence. Thank you for that. We like it. We'll give you two examples we have here. South of The Hague, this has 58,000 inhabitants, so it's about -- well, it's much smaller than The Hague, at least. So they have a living lab. Start with living lab. That's the mindset. So they have the sensors. They were put in very cheap. And they give people a very simple app with a smiley where they report if they think something is polluted. It's very cheap, very simple. We know the mayor. We know them. They've been managing. There was a lot of interesting output there. I definitely want to share that one.

The second one is a little city, or town, very small, in the north part of the Netherlands, which is Loppersum. Some people in Netherlands may not know. They're working on their own energy grid. They're building solar. We do that with the local municipalities. There are quite a few. This is a few thousands municipalities, but the villages are three or 400 people. So we have big ones to small ones. This is good to link up as well. Perhaps others have examples.

>> And just a point -- because we had a meeting before with the youth representatives -- actually these smart villages and smart cities are an opportunity for the young people to take advantage of the digital transformation. There's a long way we'll have to walk, and it's starting now. You can design your own ideas and propose them to the municipalities that are just starting. We had a conversation about the role that the young people is playing in the EuroDIG, and they had some complaints also. So this is also probably kind of an opportunity. Yeah, I work with youth people mainly, and this is what we're doing with young people.

>> What do you think? Can you help out?

>> And if so, where?

>> AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Jasmine. I'm studying in Estonia. It's important for young people to design the cities they're going to live in and might lead in the future. Yes, I do think that the inclusion of ideas of the next generation is highly relevant and necessary. Just when it comes to the environment in terms of sustainability, I think that's important. Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE: I'm Melinda from the university in Albania. I will approach it from a different point of view. If we need projects to have our smart cities, the base of this project is the data. Until when and which point we secure privacy of data because people don't want maybe to share the data with government or with private companies that want to do their cities smarter. Thank you.

>> Thank you. It's also a very good link to the next topic. Let's move to the personal data part. So if you want to collaborate, if you want to work together, you need to share information, and you will also need to share sometimes personal information because you need to be identified. They need to know who you are, need to be authenticated. Also, the sensors will pick up all kinds of things from you when you don't even know, right?

This is the digital core, but, indeed, very quickly conclude go to civilians. How do we get the resilience -- you've seen that term as well -- to make sure we can trust each other. We know who each other is even though you don't know who the other is.

One item here could be -- just one of the many notions -- could be zero knowledge proof. So I don't need to know how old you are. I just need to know whether you are old enough to buy beer at the bar. You don't need to show your identity cards, and they can see what your name is and where you come from. That's not necessary. It should only be a green light on the specific question.

So this is not sharing data. This is sharing information without the source because the source is trusted. This is one of the elements we're talking about here with the Dutch government because I work for the Dutch government. There's other data in order to trust each other. These kind of notions are putting you off the shelf available. It's not cutting edge. It's not proprietary. It's open. So we can start thinking about the architecture. How do we build this? What do you want to do with it? In how can we make it resilient?

>> AUDIENCE: I think one solution to that could be when I kind of try to study smart cities is that it's so focused on optimization of life and efficiency, but it doesn't, I think, take the neighbors into center. So I think there's a lack of civil communities perspective into design of smart cities and technologies. In order to overcome or deal with the resilience of the cities, I think civil communities need to have more voice and contributing to the design of this architecture and the technologies.

>> And how would you think that could work? What kind of recommendation would you have? I think we all agree with your call for action, but what would be your way forward to get there? Any thoughts?

>> AUDIENCE: So when you're designing that, probably could be -- people can contribute through municipality maybe, like contributing to the design to this solution, to make sure their voice is heard. I think so. Thank you.

>> I think nowadays with digital, there are so many ways. You can do it from wherever you are, if you're too old or sick or scared. If you go and speak up, people see who you are. People may have a different opinion when it's public rather than when it's in a private one.

When you ask someone, they say something different in the polling station because they do exactly what they want to do. Yeah?

So accommodation, the town hall meetings, one, but also other ways of organizing ourselves. And with digital, we should be able to get there.

>> AUDIENCE: We can also digitalize that too.

>> Okay. Good.

Go ahead.

>> Take your phone and go to that website and please make your vote, as we were just speaking about the risks and security, privacy, and any other. Please use like one or two minutes to vote and to discuss a bit about. I will do the same.

>> Well, I will give an example here. We have seen the big issue shutdown of electricity in Argentina, Uruguay, parts of Chile early this week. And whatever the reason is, that meant that even you were not able to go to fill up your car with fuel. It's not only charging your phone. It's a health scare. Generators can only do so much. So here you see -- and whatever the reason is, I don't want to speculate on that. It's not the right forum for that, but the essentials you're used to today are not available. And this is just a grid.

>> I was asked what addiction is, and I'm willing to ask back: How much time can you stay without being connected to the Internet, without having your smartphone? This is kind of like addiction. We are so much user of technology we cannot see outside of it for days or weeks. Living in a smart city might bring some sort of addiction. For example, if you're going on vacation for a month somewhere -- I don't know -- in India, for example, where there's no technology at all. Of course India is a very developed country. I'm just speaking of a tribe or something. You may feel the need of getting, you know, online again. So that's kind of like a risk that a connected city might come with.

>> I think we can conclude that it is a good sponsoring of addiction. It does not win. Security and privacy are all sort of the same. Major risks, we talked about it already with cameras and sensors. It's not only cameras. It's heartbeats, with the body cams that we're working on here in the Netherlands are off unless the law enforcement official has a higher heartbeat and there's a lot of noise because they're in a situation. Those attributes are tested -- I'm not saying deployed -- but so the question is not always on. If you just have a question to the police officer, Where should I go to? The camera is not always on.

So you heard for the first time -- I think you were from the south of Spain -- we need to understand these kinds of things. And these need to be explained continuously. I don't think it's a one-time use will work.

When the Commission asked to companies and organizations that want to pay for digital services while we're doing it -- still the uptake was not that high. Number two was security. Number four was compliance. We're not sure we're allowed to. Number one was insufficient knowledge. If you don't know, then you're scared about it. I think that's very human, very good. Very natural.

You have another one?

>> Just an additional demonstration when it comes to privacy. If you compare this to China, everybody will read the paper and see what is done in China with controlling the citizens. Everybody is using a smartphone and needs to use a smartphone because otherwise they're excluded from functionalities. It's also, in China, a cultural question, but it is an argument to pay attention to the situation. It's not comparable with the ones in western Europe so far.

>> Yep. One here?

>> Yes, just to go into that a little bit. I think addiction may be -- I won't say wrong but maybe a leading way of framing it. If you talk about reliance on certain technologies, then it becomes different because you have the China example. If you look here in the Netherlands, it's a tiny thing, but if you want the use public transport, there were booklets you could use to see the timetables. Now they have been phased out because everyone has a smartphone. That's fine, but you have to have a smartphone to see the timetables and plan your journey. That means that if that falls away, how are you going to find your way around? Maybe similar how we use Google -- always Google maps or maybe a different type of maps service, and people use physical maps a lot less. I don't think it's just about people being addicted and not able to tear themselves away from their phone, but as a society, because we say everybody has X, we build our policy around everybody having that, and then we don't actually have a fallback scenario. So I think it's not just a personal choice but a policy choice in many countries to be able to access certain services, be able to participate.

Maybe a different example is where you used to have people behind desks selling tickets. A lot of countries have that still. But in the Netherlands, if you want to buy international -- but you're told to go to a kiosk. You may not be able to get a ticket if you don't know how to use a machine. You have to use a debit card or if you have cash money, you need to find a machine that takes it or you need to find an ATM, which is not close by. So it's not all just being tied to what is in front of me, but we have to ask ourselves how far do we want to have that go.

>> I totally agree. So battery power, right? When you try to commute back in the evening or you need to board a plane and your battery is on 1% --

>> It also ties into the idea of data collection. I've recently done a little exercise where, for example, you have mobile phone apps from banks that allow you to do certain banking activities easy. It is not possible in the Netherlands to use this type of application if you do not accept both -- either Google or Apple systems. Google play has to be active, which is a very data collective service. If you want to go with the revolution, you're forced into the data collection of these two companies. That's the question where we as society, as policymakers, do we need to force banks that serve a certain purpose within our society to actually provide the same level of services who do not wish to opt into third-party user policies. I think we have that conversation far too little in in connection with conversations with smart cities and you're having to opt into user agreements and data collection if you want to use new types of technology. At the same time, we're talking about all these old people who don't want to opt into new kind of systems and are so far behind the times. But if you want to opt out yourself, you're kind of a cave person.

Yes, I want progress, but I also want to be able to manage that myself.

>> Absolutely. Any other thoughts? You? Ready to go to the next one?

What is the question?

>> I will ask to go back to the presentation and for you to continue with your presentation, not with the question, but to the presentation, to PowerPoint.

>> So data protection and data processing, we talked about cybersecurity and privacy. I think your point on Google or any other operating system collecting a lot of data is a nice example of what I showed with the ecosystem thinking with the picture of the Amazon. So any ideas on how to deal with that? It's a big enabler, and it's also a big blocker. Certain departments or certain places in the corporate worlds, that means that you're not allowed to X and you're not able to enjoy or benefit from services that may be useful.

>> In the terms of data protection and data processing, I always made the distinction between personal and non-personal data. I'm really ask the question: Is everybody thinking the same way about this?

In my eyes, if there's a sensor detecting that somebody is passing but you don't know who it is or it just sense that somebody is there -- the light goes on, for example -- is that a problem? I think non-personal data should go further. We should be able to share this data so applications can learn from the data better. I really am curious if everybody thinks the same way about distinction between personal and non-personal data because what you're saying there on linking it with your cell phone or Google or Apple account is certainly personal data.

Thank you.

>> Any thoughts on this?

>> Again, with the organizations and digital inclusion project, when we talk about data, probably there is a lack of information on how the data on myself is introduced in different platforms. Yesterday there was a really great session where they presented a game they developed at the university. I encourage you to have a look to unbiased project from the U.K. university. So they shared a project.

The idea is they foster group work around the examples of how algorithm works and how your data can be used so you become aware on the amount of data is online in different platforms.

So, for example, there's some criminal record information about yourself. There is some financial records. There is some personal information. So if we want to put the citizen in the middle of these strategies, citizens need to be aware on how their information is classified, categorized, and is treated. So I think this game, also for you but for any citizen, can be useful in order to understand how my information, personal, financial, web browsing, what websites do you visit. So I found it very interesting, just to share it with you.

>> Thank you.

>> If we are to add intelligence, you know, artificial intelligence, well, I don't necessary like this term of "artificial," but if you're to add this concept to this whole amount of data, at the end, we'll find out that the computers know more about us than we know about ourselves.

This data, the next question was about data collection. What do you know about data collection? What kind of data the companies and the government are collecting about us? I'm not willing to share my views. I'm willing to listen to your views about that. So, please.

>> Just looking at it from a point of view of a private person or a citizen or a consumer, it's almost impossible to have a view on what's happening to the data that I'm even leaking at this moment through my cell phone to whoever in the world they've never met, never gave any consent to leak this data from my cell phone because it's built in somewhere in the software they know for certain not even the app builder knows about because he gets that information from the Internet somewhere, and he uses the tools to build an app which looks very nice and shiny for a company that never asked for it.

Information I give to, say, a department store in the Netherlands has nothing to do with the data that flows out of my cell phone from the moment I accept the app. The app builder is not going to the department store. It's going to about 67 or 87 U.S./Canadian companies and one European company, I'm told. So, in other words, I'm not even in control of my own data.

So once this starts happening with smart cities, then I will lose everything I've got, basically, just because I'm walking around somewhere, driving around in my car, probably be leaking data about me.

That's why I introduce point four in this discussion, the sharing of data for good, in other words, is that cities, governments are collecting data on everybody, but what can we do with that data once it's made available for the common good? And that would mean that I leak my data unknowingly, basically. Everybody does that. It will show a lot about health environments in certain parts of cities. It will tell about traffic. It will tell about accidents. It will tell about -- I don't know -- other sort of life forms in the city that may not even know about. I don't know. But a lot of things can be learned from that, but we have to have provisions that the data is going to be made available, and how do we actually make sure that it happens, that universities get the data they need to look into health care or the health environment that people looking into the environment can actually use this data to see that this part of the city is polluting and another part of the city is not. Is there a course for that, et cetera, et cetera. But we need to have that in place, whether that's legal or ethical or voluntary, but what sort of framework do we need to create to make sure the data is used to make our lives better and not just to send us the next advertisement we don't need in two seconds or less? That's my question. Thank you.

>> I would like to respond on your question. So you have the GDPR, that's the personal data protection. It's a big, legal document accepted by all the European nations. Next to that, you now have another issue coming up, the ePrivacy. That's the non-personal data. They would like to take over the same principles as GDPR but it's really, as I can say, kind of a mess at the moment. It's not going anywhere. It doesn't leave any room for innovation. A lot of companies are holding back because they have the same worries as you, I think.

In order to compete against these big companies like Google and Facebook that have a treasure of data and a gold mine of data producing, we need to, I think, as governments, as small projects, research programmes, we should be able to share this data so we have a critical mass of data so we can also make other applications.

So I would also recommend everybody to look into the EDPR privacy -- the ePrivacy programme that's going on at the European level and contribute so there can be as much ( indiscernible ) as possible.

>> We have divided architecture. We have divided our public space and private space. In the public space in the Netherlands -- I'm not sure outside of Europe -- but my private space is my space. Technologies do enter my space. I have to be careful because I'm not a lawyer like Arthur, but nobody has an answer about how to really protect your private space being private. Either way, you acknowledge that your private space is no longer private anymore or you maintain the law and make sure it's private. It can't be both.

>> So on the other side there.

>> Thank you. I'm from the Netherlands. I would like to react to things I've heard do you say, also in relation to your previous point about the distinction between personal and non-personal data. I wonder if this distinction is clear enough. In practice, particularly in cases where you describe you would combine data from different sensors or from different sensors if privacy is protected enough. To give a specific example, I, myself, was recently interested in a car insurance which would give me a discount if I would drive well. While I consider myself a good driver, as all of us do, I thought I would get this discount, so I'm willing to give up some privacy and let them track my driving habits. I did ask, If I end my contract with you, what will happen to my data? They said, we'll erase your personal data, your name, birthday, everything, but we'll keep data on the physical location on the car, driving speed, et cetera, to continue learning and possibly share this data. Then I thought, well, if they have data of a car parking every day in front of my house, even without mentioning the address, and they share it, they would know that the inhabitants -- I'm very curious to see how this will work when there will be legal cases falling from the GDPR, which is, of course, very recent, but innovation, of course, is very relevant by combining datasets, but I think that there is also a risk in combining datasets. Privacy is no longer guaranteed. I'm curious how others view this issue.

>> So normally -- so you have the GDPR, and that's personal data, and the definition is in the GDPR. Everything is non-personal data until it becomes personal data, and then things can become non-personal data but it can become personal again after. This is dynamic. There's a clear distinction between them. You need to look at the specific point in time, and, indeed, it can change.

A couple of things -- notions that help. One is, as Martin said, on the connectivity and on leaking without even knowing, even though you have a suspicion, basically shutting it off in the right way and not shutting off your phone -- because, still, Telco knows where you are. It's a service. It knows in which cell region you are. Not only where your car is parked but what cell region you are. This is a dynamic attribute you can use for good -- everything you can use for good, by the way, you can use for malicious things.

So disconnecting in a modern way, which is not possible. On your phone there's a little driver that, for instance, activates your camera or microphone or Bluetooth, et cetera. There are European initiatives very early that are focusing on that level. So this is in the hardware itself. It doesn't need to be a phone. It can be anything. It's only on if there's actually a reason and a proper reason, and you decide. The person is entitled to decide. I'm not scared about the camera so much. I'm more scared of the microphone.

Accrued anonymized data. Anonymous data is valuable. It can be used for good in an easy way. It's going to be very difficult, depending on how far you accrue. Accrual of anonymous data is something the commission has been focusing on now. It was two years ago in Estonia when your country was the chair from MIT. I think it's interesting, also, for you to have a look at accrued anonymous data. That's another notion that I see coming up more and more.

And then you have raw data without being able to link it up. Of course, again, it doesn't mean it can never become personal data again.

>> I would like to respond on two points. I think, firstly, on the idea of data as it's been rumored, it seems data appears from nowhere. It's a process connected in a certain situation, but it never just pops up. For example, what we just heard about phones connecting to a cell phone tower that, of course, we can deduct some location data from it, but I hear it as a call that we should share data openly. We shouldn't act like that is neutral data. If we use that in different applications, we basically use the lens we get from technology as it is, and we apply to different situations. I think we should be very wary of treating data like it represents reality in an objective way because it definitely doesn't, and oftentimes -- especially if you're less informed, unfortunately, a lot of politicians talk about it, like you pull it out of the ground.

The second point is the dichotomy between personal and non-personal data, even what we would call non-personal data is within a power structure presence. For example, the idea of just knowing if somebody is there, so tracking somebody moved here. Okay. If we put that around cities, we can track where people are, how many people pass by or a presently in a certain location. We don't know who it is, but that can then be used in a certain context to control where populations are going, and that might be out of the goodness of the heart of our politicians or of the police, but it might end up like saying, Hey, we see a lot of people loitering around this area, but loitering in itself is not a bad situation. We see that for people from different ethnic groups have different ideas about what being in the public space means.

So we see people in the Netherlands from Moroccan backgrounds stay in groups. But if police decide to patrol more, they could be discriminating. It represents all kinds of societal structures that are then subject to control. So that's the second point I would like to make. Trying to read the world in data is always an exercise of power of one over the other, and when we are doing it, we should be very wary why we're doing it. It doesn't matter if I'm pinpointing specifically this person or that person, but it could just be people as a whole, and do we want the government to be in charge of that? Do we want other people to be able to access that? Do we want private companies with access to that? This needs to be mapped out as well besides making sure everybody has the agency within the development process to have their voices heard.

Thank you.

>> Sir, I think we forgot you, right? You want to say something, correct?

>> Thank you. Partly, I wanted to say what the lady in the corner already said, the distinction between personal and non-personal and anonymous and it could be shifted if there's more data available. The other question I have is the distension between personal data, that everyone is focusing on, and busy data. For small businesses, it's very hard to make themselves unknown for some larger data mining companies. I think it's a question: Should small companies be protected from the data hunger from other companies or governments? Sometimes for business it's good to have some secrecy in preparation for your business.

>> You want to respond?

>> I don't know if it's correct, but I think when it's secrecy of the company, you would be protected by intellectual property and trade secret. Also in comment with that, because you were talking about the separation of personal and non-personal and then the smart city often using information. One of the elements, what I see in Barcelona is the appliance of open data. So it can be like the open services not unlimited to the governance but it could also be from the private companies. So what you say can be true as well because many companies utilize a lot of data. The data need to be -- people needs access of data equally. So data is for everybody, not just for some entities, some companies to force innovation and so on. Maybe this is -- maybe this is something that we should just wait and see until the dispute is coming. So when there's a dispute, if it's not, maybe we'll just stick with what we have now. I don't know. I am asking for the response, actually, because the concept of sharing data and protecting data, it's a bit different concept. The goal is different, but somehow it's always like we'll with most like each other.

Thank you.

>> Your notion of open data, of course, is quite important that it's not personal data. Your question is the commercial platforms or a platform of any consideration, can you trust the platform; and, well, we've seen in a lot of cases where you cannot. So the European platforms, perhaps, that we need to build together not only in Europe but also outside. Why not? It's not that difficult anymore. But we're not doing it. We're complaining against certain players but also saying why are we not picking up -- we can make our own game.

>> The data for good, you had a great example. There's so much information and knowledge, but it's very difficult to get it out there. Reuse of data is quite important as well.

>> I especially mean is there a place for the small business, as an entity, to have some protection? The business as a person.

>> This is the topic that's current at the Commission level. The platform economy, data economy, non-competition, there's not, at this point, a regulation on it, but, DigiGrow, they're working on that one.

So we need to wrap up. Getting to the wrap up. Impressive amount of words already on the slides. So you want to have the mic and go through keywords.

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: Hi, everybody. I'm Stefania Grottola. We provide independent reported a messages at the end of each session. These are the messages. They're a bit long, especially the first one, in which I tried to include the definition.

While coming downstairs, the gentleman made a comment. In the last message, it would be between personal and non-personal and business data. So I could read them all, but it would take too much time. Let's have a look and see if there's strong disagreement. Otherwise, we send it to the Secretariat.

>> So please take a look and add something, if you feel like, or delete. We can do that for you. You extend your will to us.

>> It should be a rough consensus to send the messages to the Secretariat, but we can change it and include the conversation we have.

>> Thank you.

With the fourth one, I would add to start working on a kind of framework in which this data perhaps is even forced to hand over to other organizations to ensure the good, just as a suggestion.

>> So data sharing is there, and data sharing at this point, as you may know, is on the agenda here in Europe. The next Commission, it's one of our major topics that we're going to work on. I think it's also time to get this out.

>> One small correction -- or addition to chapter one, the last line. What I mentioned is the description of smart cities, prescriptive smart cities is not my text to look briefly at the references. It's ( indiscernible ) to trouble concerning author rights, et cetera.

>> As 2.3, the problem I have with that is it also calls smart cities into the solution. I'm not in disagreement that the smart cities and technologies can help in providing solutions for the STGs. I think it's now a way to phrase now and key variables --

>> It's an enabler. Is that better?

>> It's an enabler. It helps. Even then I would say I would like to have more of the kind of negotiation that it also has with different public values in terms of -- of course, it provides value to STGs but affects human rights with security, et cetera. I don't quite see that represented there. Maybe we can add something along those lines.

>> We all think smart cities are good. I think that's your point.

>> I would say they are not.

>> Thank you.

So any other thoughts or inputs, things you miss out on? There's still some white spaces on the slide. We can add more text. I'm a lawyer. I like text. Or do we wrap it up? Do you want to do that, please?

>> If nobody --

>> Sorry. One more. Last one.

>> I was wondering why there are no critics or input where the framework with how the smart city works, for data, personal data, data regulation in each city where it's already compatible or not or, for example, when it's related with business data, whether it needs to accommodate. I know there's reform that needs to go on. What happened with the trade secret? Maybe it needs to evolve. I don't know how to manage the words correctly, but, for sure, legal structure is important for the smart city, as important as the role of the cities and the technology itself.

>> Okay. Rapporteur, are you able to do something with that suggestion?

>> Just to reflect the main discussion that we had and, of course, yes, it was touched upon, and I will try to fit it in, but this is not an opportunity to add more or to just comment more than has already been done.

>> All right. So behind you there's a gentleman.

>> Thank you. I just have a small issue with the beginning of point four. Although it's not directly discussed at this session, but the first sentence gives me the impression that the only government challenges are linked to either data privacy or cybersecurity. I mean, there are a lot more things also. Once you start rolling all the applications, there might be consequences and so on. I would suggest adding something during the session one of the important elements that were suggested -- I mean, just to avoid somebody that wasn't at the session reads it and says, Okay. There are only three issues, and if you fix them, we are safe.

>> Thank you.

>> And there's one more.

>> Yes. We are talking about smart cities and governance. I think for the relevance of the topic, the word "youth" should be included somehow. I think we all agree that smart cities and the momentum we're living in is a great opportunity for inclusion of youth in this process. I think for further events or for a reference for this session, I think -- I'm sorry. I have problems with my view, so I cannot really read properly, so I am struggling, but I think the word "youth" or the inclusion of young people. Did you find it?

>> We will have an extensive report, and, of course, I will take this comment into consideration. These are just supposed to be very short, relatively short messages.

>> We have a consensus here. Anybody here that really does not like this, has strong feelings opposing it? Or is the satisfactory level enough to say that we say this is good to go? Yeah?

>> It looks like.

>> Excellent.

>> So we had 90 minutes. We used 95 minutes. That means it was kind of like, you know, challenging and a good debate, the smart cities. As far as I know, it was the first time at EuroDIG and the session on smart cities was organized.

So thank you all for participating.

Special thanks for changing the slides.

Thank you, Arthur, Martin, for your great inputs. You were the key participants for this session.

And, of course, thank you, everybody, again. See you next time. Maybe EuroDIG will reorganize this session next year. So if your interest is still high on the smart city topic, we'll probably see each other next year at the same sort of round table as you had today.

Okay. Thank you.

(Applause)

This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.

Smart cities and governance – WS 09 2019

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Smart cities and governance – WS 09 2019

Session teaser

Session description

Format

Further reading

People

Current discussion, conference calls, schedules and minutes

Messages

Video record

Transcript

Navigation menu

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