Activism has never been so easy. Urban residents will soon be giving up their personal data – not to the usual social media giants, but to make their cities a better place to live.
The three-year EU-funded project, dubbed the Decentralised Citizen Owned Data Ecosystem (DECODE), will see a total of four pilot trials launch in Barcelona and Amsterdam at the end of 2017. In each city, 1000 people will be given an app through which they can share data about themselves to help companies or government groups create products or services to improve the city. The project is due to end in 2019.
Each citizen will be able to decide exactly how much of their data is uploaded to the platform and how it should be used. For example, a person may decide that location-tracking data about parks they visit can be used by the city council but not private companies.
Individuals’ data-sharing preferences will be stored on the blockchain – a digital ledger that securely stores data across a network of computers. This is the same technology that underpins bitcoin transactions and in theory makes it difficult for individuals to be identified.
Jonathan Bright at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK thinks it’s a good idea for cities to use crowdsourced citizen data to help make planning decisions. “There’s really a lot of good that can be done with public data,” he says.
Nesta, a UK innovation charity, is working with 13 partner agencies across the European Union on the €5 million project. The DECODE website criticises online companies for hoarding data about people and refusing to make it available to “people and organisations who want to create solutions and services for public benefit”.
“People don’t really have control over their data,” says Tom Symons, a Nesta researcher leading the work on DECODE. He hopes the project will end up channelling public data into a greater number of socially beneficial projects run by the government or companies. Nesta is consulting with local governments, entrepreneurs and other groups to understand what kind of data they would like to have access to through the DECODE platform.
Symons says it could be possible to combine publicly available data such as social media posts with location information to better understand how people feel about different parts of the city. This could be useful for pinpointing locations in which people feel unsafe or providing insight on how they use public spaces and transport.
As part of the project, the DECODE team also plans to launch a website or app that lets citizens share things with other people in the city. People might use the platform to offer up spare power tools or even their car for other residents to borrow, says Symons.
In addition, residents will be able to use the platform to comment on city legislation, put forward their own ideas and vote on proposals. This builds on a platform called Decidim Barcelona, which was put in place to encourage more open and collaborative decision-making in the city.
But Bright says the DECODE team might find it tricky to get a wide range of people to use the platform. People who want to take part in the project are already likely to be civic-minded and digitally aware, so it may be hard to judge whether similar schemes could be rolled out to entire cities.
A variety of successful data-sharing platforms already focus on projects for the public good. In the UK, for example, FixMyStreet lets people quickly report graffiti or faulty street lighting in their local area; and the running and cycling app Strava Metro shares users’ data with local governments to help them plan cycling and pedestrian routes.
Even though it won’t have anything like the reach of the big data-gathering companies such as Google or Facebook, Bright thinks that if DECODE focuses on solving a few specific problems, it could still generate plenty of useful data. “That kind of co-creation of data is something that would not easily come out of Google or Facebook in a systematic way, so there’s good potential there,” he says.