About the report
This report documents the progress of several ‘smart city’ initiatives currently underway in communities across Canada. It will be particularly useful for local government staff who work within municipal, regional, and other local government structures on initiatives featuring smart or digital components. The report provides a glimpse into the institutional changes that local governments are experiencing and how these align with the ideals of “Open Smart Cities.”
This report has been produced for the Community Solutions Network, a community-centric platform for communities to connect and build a national centre of excellence in Open Smart Communities. As the project lead, Evergreen works with its lead technical partner, Open North, and other partners to provide valuable information, learning opportunities, advisory and capacity building services to Canadian communities in key areas of data and technology, helping to improve the lives of residents.
Three common problem areas
The report is structured around three common problem areas within the smart and digital space that were identified by working with communities across Canada via the Community Solutions Network. The report centres on challenges around how to adopt data and technology into local government projects, or the means to achieve better societal outcomes, and not the outcomes themselves.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 each focus on a single challenge facing many local governments as follows:
Chapter 2: Co-creating strategies with the community
We observe that many local government services and programs do not reach all residents, contributing to the further systematic exclusion of vulnerable people. This increases barriers to residents’ participation in the civic, social, and economic aspects of life.
How are local governments working with partner organizations to improve services and programs for residents, with a focus on underserved communities?
Chapter 3: Collectively managing information and data
We observe that local governments are not making consistent and deliberate decisions about the collection, management, and sharing of data, thereby limiting their ability to use data to address complex challenges in their communities.
How are local governments working to improve their data governance practices so that data can more effectively be leveraged towards transparent and collaborative decisions?
Chapter 4: Rethinking the procurement of digital technologies
We observe that local government procurement of digital technologies requires public servants to adapt their procurement processes to increasingly dynamic and opaque digital technologies. Established procurement processes are not adapted to meet the needs of the government and solve community challenges.
How are local governments procuring digital technologies to meet their needs and the needs of their community?
Community cases
The report provides examples of how communities have taken positive actions to adopt and adapt data and technology to overcome these challenges. These cases were selected based on their participation in the Community Solutions Network as well as their connection to the problem area (see Appendix A for more details). This report highlights the following seven community examples:
- Town of Bridgewater, NS — Procuring an energy management system to tackle energy poverty
- City of Calgary, AB — Bridging the digital divide by establishing community partnerships
- Town of Churchill, MB — Leveraging data to inform climate change adaptation
- City of Fredericton, NB — Creating a civic innovation lab to procure local solutions
- City of Saskatoon, SK — Piloting free public internet to address digital inequity
- District of Squamish, BC — Opening data for internal and external decision making
- City of Trois-Rivières, QC — Driving smart city projects through a shared multi-stakeholder vision
Recommendations
The final section concludes with the following three recommendations to increase the effectiveness of local government approaches:
Commit to stakeholder engagement — especially residents — early and often: Local governments worked closely with community partners to ensure that diverse perspectives are included in projects and initiatives. Residents should be engaged early and often to ensure that their needs are integrated to build ongoing trust and relationships between governments and their residents.
Govern data and technology: Local governments see value in data as a resource to support operations and decision-making. This is partially due to the different motivations and skills of, and opportunities for, different departments and organizations. To effectively and collaboratively use data as a resource, governments must explicitly address data and technology governance.
Monitor and evaluate your goals and process: Communities face challenges both internally with processes as well as with setting and achieving realistic outcomes. They want to demonstrate the impact of their work and how individual projects and successes are transformative to their local government operations and desired outcomes. The increased adoption of monitoring and evaluation frameworks will help track progress and communicate success and learnings beyond a team, department, or local government.