This year’s Smart City World Expo Congress in Barcelona emphasized inclusivity as part of its motto. Open North, as an organization that understands inclusivity as a foundation for our work on digital transformation, was there to engage with people from all around the globe and further our mission to use data and technology for the common good in the best ways possible. This blog dives into some of the observations and considerations we came away with.
Unsurprisingly, of course, the word ‘technology’ was uttered every few seconds in any given event at SCWEC22. It was, after, the Smart City World Expo – and as such unquestioningly associated with ‘technology.’ What did surprise, and then give cause for serious thought, was the way it was most frequently uttered. As in, “we want to fix the digital divide with technology,” or, “our plan is to leverage technology to improve service delivery,” or even “with technology so many new avenues for transformation are opened up.” What is this ‘technology’ I kept asking myself, that is so overwhelmingly presented in the future tense and the passive voice to boot? Why is it never already here; did we not have technology before? And who is the implied agent of change in these passive sentences? Some unnamed doer, or even technology itself?
These may seem like hairsplitting questions – the idea of smart cities does seem inherently futuristic after all, and this was an expo intended at least in part for the sellers of this future. But this unspoken yet very definite lens of technology for the future is a point worth examining a bit more critically. A great deal of opportunity for real impact in digital transformation is lost if we don’t think about the technology we already have, and who did what to get it there.
Open North’s position has long been that while many of the developments encapsulated in the idea of the smart city are genuinely currently beneficial and also hold great promise for doing good in the future, the ones that are so are deeply rooted in understanding (digital) transformations that have come before and the people who drove them. After all, without a deep understanding of these two components, how can we possibly know what has worked, what has failed, and so what innovations to pursue next – and which ones to perhaps better reject as unlikely to deliver on their promises.
It was notable that across dozens of panels at a three-day conference, what stood out was that it was the municipal employees from cities around the world, and representatives of nonprofits and other organizations like UN Habitat, Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, or Living-in.EU, who consistently engaged in this kind of analysis, who consistently acknowledged failures, barriers, risks, and worked to only develop and implement digital transformation projects that would most benefit everyone.
This stark divide between those who were directly involved in the implementation of digital transformation projects and those selling ‘technology’ for the future underscored once again how important it is to start with inclusivity. This means, from Open North’s perspective, to engage all those possibly affected by a project and proactively enable those who face higher barriers to participation or have experienced marginalization from such efforts. It means to start with the people most directly affected, understand their needs, their histories of success and failure with different projects, and then go from there. ‘Technology’ has always existed, and the kinds that are being developed now are no more a magic solution than those that came before. And if we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that while some technologies did good, a lot of inequality has also been produced.
‘Technology’ has always existed, and the kinds that are being developed now are no more a magic solution that those that came before.
Luckily, the folks talking about their experiences doing just this are blazing trails in innovative, historically informed, and inclusion-driven digital innovation projects. A core message from places as different as San Antonio, Texas (Emily Royall and the SmartSA Sandbox project); Santa Beatriz, Peru (Lucia Nogales and the Ocupa tu Calle project); and Barcelona, Spain (Paula Mèlich Bonet and the i2CAT Foundation) was an approach to technological innovations that doesn’t treat residents as stakeholders to be polled but empowers them to rethink their roles in digital transformation projects. These are the people with whom and to whom technological change happens, and as such their inclusion is key to a project’s sustainability – the other theme of the expo.
A second central observation was the importance of nonprofit involvement in good digital transformation projects. One panelist, Tom Snyder, observed that “the dash in the middle of the public-private partnership is often a nonprofit.” This key role was on display throughout the conference, with organizations like Smart Columbus, UN Habitat, Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, Living-In.EU, Open and Agile Smart Cities, and many more describing the difficult process of developing strategies, policies, and programs that actually improved lives and safeguarded residents.
They worked to translate and mediate between government, private sector, and residents; empowering the latter’s voices and involvement, and so enabling the co-development of procurement policies, transparency regulations, data-sharing agreements, data protection impact assessment frameworks, and much more. This is the kind of real-world innovation and digital transformation work that is obscured by such futuristic talk of “technology solutions.” Suffice it to say, this is also the kind of digital transformation work that is deeply rooted in history and inclusivity, and so produced sustainable projects that genuinely benefit the common good.
This is the cause and process to which we at Open North are also dedicated in all our programs, from Montreal en Commun to the Community Solutions Network, and our projects with Pulsar and DatAid and many others. Building inclusive and sustainable relationships with local government, residents, other nonprofits, and the private sector is at the very heart of our mission to develop strategies for using data and technology for the common good: building a more just society, overriding short-term considerations and the private interests of organizations or individuals.