A New Data Deal: the Case of Barcelona
Our recent paper analyzes Barcelona’s pioneering experience governing data
Cities are at the center of the policy debate around data, its use, and its governance.
People cluster in cities because they seek the benefits produced by the interaction of people, organizations and ideas in a limited geographic space. This activity can increasingly be translated into data through sensors, mobile phones, electronic devices, and digital platforms for mobility, accommodation and shopping that track these activities and tag them to specific locations. Just as an example, in Barcelona, de sensors infrastructure, Sentilo, generates 3 million daily recordings measuring energy, noise, rubbish, weather, parking areas, air quality, water levels and flows of bicycles, people and vehicles. All these data represents a great opportunity to improve life in cities, but it also poses important risks. If data is obtained breaching privacy, is used to pursue illegal and socially damaging goals, or is hoarded and exploited to benefit just a few, the increasing abundance of data – which will not stop – will just make our problems, urban and global, worst.
City governments have therefore a fundamental role to play on how to govern data so that it is applied to increase, rather than damage, public value. Yet, few know what this means in practice. Barcelona is among the reduced number of trailblazer cities that has explored concrete ways to articulate such new social contract around data. This effort was led by Francesca Bria, after being appointed Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer by Mayor Ada Colau in 2016. In this paper jointly written with Francesca, Sarah Barns, and Rainer Kattel, we describe that experience and reflect on some of the lessons that can be learned from Barcelona’s pioneering effort.
Sarah summarized the main lessons crisply in this Twitter thread, and anyone interested in the topic should read – and hopefully engage with and comment on – the working paper. In this post, however, I wanted to share a couple of reflections that the writing of this paper sparked in my own thinking about this topic.
First, there are three fundamental elements that underpin data governance: access, control, and use. This aligns with the definition by Marina Micheli and co-authors that I mentioned in a previous entry. If city governments want to govern data, they need to think about the instruments that will allow them to (i) access the data that they need to perform their functions, (ii) control the data to ensure the quality, completeness, biases, and ethical standards of the data, and (iii) use the data to generate public value through the provision of services, the enforcement of regulation, the generation of infrastructures, etc.
Second, the instruments that city governments can deploy to access, control, and use data are mostly new and untested. In the paper, we describe some of the tools that Barcelona introduced, which can be regulatory (like the data sovereignty clauses in procurement contracts or data sharing requirements for micromobility licenses), some of them organizational (the creation of a new municipal data office), and some of them technological (the introduction of a data lake or the development of a blockchain-enabled data sharing infrastructure through DECODE).
Third, as the example of DECODE shows, this cannot be a government-only effort, but it cannot be government-free one either. One of the key enablers in Barcelona was the well-articulated, organized and technologically savvy civil society who had been involved in the debate and activism around data governance for a long time. Equally, governments play an unavoidable role in data governance. Purely grassroots and decentralized initiatives will likely remain marginal and unable to scale. This, of course, has implications for the design of these initiatives, since government involvement means financial and political leverage, but also has strings (e.g., dependence on political agendas) attached. I would argue that the need for public involvement to ensure that decentralized infrastructures can foster, rather than extract, public value has gained salience and importance in the age of crypto.
Finally, given this central role of (city) governments in governing data, investing in institutional capacities is absolutely critical. Governments need to acquire and nurture the assets, organizational capabilities and leadership practices that will enable them to engage with civil society, generate alliances, and deploy the tools to gain access, control and use data to generate public value.