Today some of my thoughts on Chicago’s smart cities efforts were published in a paper from Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies:
“Making a Smart City a Fairer City: Chicago’s Technologists Address Issues of Privacy, Ethics, and Equity, 2011-2018” Here’s a complete PDF and here’s a snip:
Daniel O’Neil, who led the Smart Chicago Collaborative, advised cities considering implementation of data analytics projects to listen carefully to public input to make sure projects served the public interest rather than merely the interests of government officials. “Try to solve real problems by having methods to discover what the real problems are,” O’Neil said. “Create systems to listen to people in honest ways.” O’Neil conceded the difficulty of soliciting input from citizens who lacked technical expertise or advocacy tools, but felt that investment in genuine public engagement would result in more-relevant and more-effective projects that responded to popular concerns. “We have to build and invest in methods for listening.”
