Citizens gather large amounts of data through their personal devices that could benefit the municipality’s planning and innovation processes. In the crowdsensing pilot project “I ♥ ViGÅ” Stavanger municipality will receive, anonymize, and analyse personally generated data from heart rate monitors and try to use this in municipal planning processes. The project aims to increase the degree of co-creation with citizens by simplifying how they can share their personally generated data with the public sector.
The project has identified several challenges when it comes to transmitting data from citizens to the public sector and aim to solve some of these in collaboration with citizens and corporations.
Secure and trust-based data sharing
Citizens have a high degree of trust when it comes to data sharing and are generally quick to accept terms and conditions for the benefit of large technology organisations. We see that a human-centric paradigm shift is ongoing, one that is aimed at a fair, sustainable, and prosperous digital society, where the sharing of personal data is based on trust as well as a balanced relationship between individuals and organisations. We want to contribute to this paradigm shift by scaling this project and enabling more cities to initiate in secure data collection projects with their citizens.
Improving on data compliance
Innovation projects are too often disqualified due to lack of understanding and experience with data compliance (GDPR, data sensitivity, necessity). While there is a global shortage in this skillset, cities must decide whether to limit their portfolio to data collection projects which only handle unsensitive data or must use scarce resources to ensure data compliance. Data compliance in innovation projects is a relatively new field for smart cities and one where mistakes are easily made due to inexperience with the complex jurisdictions. This project is pursuing a standardized approached to data sharing based co-creation processes. Such a solution will safeguard the cities legal responsibilities while enabling more efficient crowdsensing projects.
Testing a consent control tool
Currently this crowdsensing project is testing dynamic consent control in the pilot “I ♥ ViGÅ”. The tool helps citizens make informed decisions about personally generated data that is shared with the municipality. This tool enables faster and easier co-creation between citizens and the municipality as it is clear what the citizens consent to and the city is given the chance to change the consent as projects evolve. It is desired to further develop and test the consent control tool to make it scalable to other projects and cities in the network. To add significant value to the crowdsensing project we now aim to pilot the solution in other cities in the Nordic smart city network.
About the Crowdsensed Data Project:
- Stavanger is lead on the project with Aarhus, Vejle, Helsinki, and Copenhagen as participating cities.
- The project is financed by Nordic Innovation and part of the overall Nordic Healthy Cities project aiming at creating supportive urban environments and living, to improve health and quality of life.