An ongoing power struggle between cities and digital platforms is playing out in municipal data sharing programs and the debate surrounding them. What does it mean for the future of urban governance?
Who sets the rules in cities?
While “city hall” might seem like the self-evident answer, in the more than a decade now since the first stay at an AirBnB and since the first trip in an Uber, tech companies—starting with the so called “sharing economy” and continuing with “urban tech” and “smart cities”—have been setting digital platform rules for their users’ behavior in urban space, complicating the question of city governance, and triggering an ongoing power struggle between public agencies and private digital platforms.
One way this power struggle is playing out is in the emergence of local-government-imposed data sharing mandates under which cities require that private companies—often networked, sharing economy platforms—report granular digital information to a public agency on an ongoing basis as a prerequisite for permission to operate within the jurisdiction.
Depending on who you ask, these programs either provide needed tech oversight and democratic accountability while charting a promising and innovative new path for public-private collaboration and informed government decision making; or are an alarming overreach, infringing on civil liberties and in the process building a dangerous surveillance infrastructure for a big-brother police state.
This framing matters. How we ultimately conceive of data sharing programs will have broad implications, not just for who can access user-generated information about urban environments, but fundamentally about how we define the commons and how we conceive of democratic governance in our cities in the information age. Given what’s at stake, the heated nature of the debate surrounding these programs is understandable. However, as someone who has worked in for the public sector in a city hall, who has worked in non-profit advocacy to promote digital rights and data ethics in cities, and who most recently worked for an urban tech platform directly involved in real-life data sharing programs, the current “pick a side” binary of the debate—pinning local government oversight and public sovereignty against user privacy and civil liberties—can feel stuck in the abstract and ideological, far removed from the nuanced reality of what is happening on the ground in communities.
I’m here at the Belfer Center’s Technology and Public Purpose program to explore that nuanced reality in depth and to contribute what I find to the conversation. That’s why throughout this academic year I’ll be researching municipal data sharing mandates across a variety of jurisdictions and technology sectors—starting with data reporting requirements imposed on sharing economy companies by local governments here in the US—and developing an online public resource hub that will make the specifics of these programs more discoverable, comparable and accessible to stakeholders—from advocates and academics, to public officials and policymakers, to tech companies, and to platform users and neighborhood residents.
I anticipate that this online data sharing policy hub will include:
A searchable repository of data sharing policy texts and associated program language made machine-readable and downloadable
A research database of policy metadata evaluating and comparing data sharing programs across a set of standardized parameters
A map of what cities are requiring what companies/sectors to share data and why
Qualitative and quantitative research findings and analysis that may include case studies, trend analysis, a taxonomy of emergent data sharing governance models, normative recommendations and identification of risks and best practices, etc.
The conversation about how we conceive of privacy, the right to information, and democratic power in the city is one we need to have together. A municipal data sharing policy hub will provide a shared starting point for opening up that discourse.
To the extent that responsible data sharing mandates might advance public interests and democratic accountability, I hope a municipal data sharing policy hub will help public officials, policy drafters and the communities they represent develop better policy.
To the extent that these programs might pose risks to user privacy and civil liberties in urban space, I hope research outputs will aid advocates and academics in taking stock of where risks are greatest and holding public officials to account.
And, to the extent that data sharing programs have something to tell us beyond how we handle scooter data—about what information our democratic institutions are owed and why, about who gets to set the rules in urban communities, about what limits we should place on government reach and on platform power—I hope this work helps illuminate how we are encoding those values and makes the conversation surrounding those political choices just more tangible, understandable and accessible. Because this vision for the future shouldn’t be set by a DOT director or by Uber; and it shouldn’t be up to a handful of academics and technologists and urban policy nerds (myself included). It’s a conversation we all need to have together.
If you’d like to join the conversation and get involved in this work—especially if you are a public official or tech company employee with direct experience with municipal data sharing programs—please reach out by sending an email to stephenlarrick@hks.harvard.edu
For more information on this publication: Belfer Communications Office
For Academic Citation: Larrick , Stephen.“Municipal Data Sharing Mandates and the Future of Urban Governance .” Perspectives on Public Purpose, November 9, 2021, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/municipal-data-sharing-mandates-and-future-urban-governance.
As shared in my previous post, my research as an academic year 2021-2022 Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center is focused on what we can learn and understand about the future of the city by exploring a new kind of policy local public agencies are increasingly adopting in response to digital sharing economy platforms deployed in their jurisdictions: data sharing mandates.
These sometimes controversial policies have become a key battlefield in an ongoing power struggle between cities and digital platforms. Debates over privacy, tech accountability, and digital sovereignty, point to the need for productive discourse about data sharing mandates and their implications for local democracy.
That’s why today I’m excited to announce the launch of a new resource intended to inform the discourse: the Municipal Data Sharing Policy Hub.
THE MUNICIPAL DATA SHARING POLICY HUB: A NEW RESOURCE FOR EXPLORING DATA REPORTING REQUIREMENTS FOR SHARING ECONOMY PLATFORMS
My team and I have been hard at work gathering dozens of local government data sharing mandates—relatively recent policies that require sharing economy platforms providing services such as ride hail (ex. Uber), short-term rentals (AirBnB), or micromobility (ex. Lime) to share data with a local government agency on a regular basis. We’ve scoured government websites to find buried PDFs, given these policy documents close reads, and structured them with some basic standardized metadata.
Today, for the first time, we’re sharing that work publicly so that researchers, advocates, and policy makers can access these resources on one website designed to make finding, analyzing, or comparing these novel policies easier.
For now, the MDSPH website is simple. It includes
a brief introduction to the project and why these policies are worthy of consideration, analysis, and scrutiny
a basic interactive map that shows data sharing mandates plotted geospatially by jurisdiction
an open spreadsheet containing over 60 data sharing policies, structured tabularly with the following fields:
“jurisdiction” - where geographically and politically the policy has been adopted or where it applies
“policy type” - whether the policy is a law/ordinance, an administrative regulation, a permit or license application requirement, or some other policy instrument
"platform type” - whether the policy applies to ride hail platforms, short term rental platforms, micromobility platforms, or some other kind of sharing economy platform or technology
“policy link” - a direct link to the original policy file, as provided by the relevant government agency
“policy date” - the date a policy was adopted or went into effect
a shared folder / “repository” through which anyone can download all the raw policy PDFs in bulk.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES WE’RE WORKING ON
While the map, database, and downloadable repository are important first steps, we hope to do more to increase access to these novel data sharing policies by adding functionality to the MDSPH site in the coming weeks:
Search policies by text - we have been using optical character recognition (OCR) to generate raw text data for each policy. We hope to make searchable text files available for download soon, and to provide functionality enabling visitors to the MDSPH to search the full data sharing policy corpus for key words or phrases (such as “privacy”, “API”, or “standard”)
More metadata / tags - we have been giving close reads to many of the policies collected thus far, asking key questions and analyzing the policies by key parameters as we do. We hope to share some of this analysis in the form of additional metadata fields or tags in the future, to aid in discoverability, comparability, and analysis of trends.
We know that this first list of data sharing mandates is incomplete so, we’ll continue to add data sharing mandates to the database, map, and repository as we go, and would love your help! If you are familiar with any policies requiring sharing economy platforms to report data to local government agencies that we may have missed, please fill out our policy submission form here.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
Beyond providing access to policy documents, a big goal in launching the MDSPH website is to share an open invitation to the community for collaboration, contributions, and criticism, as we advance our project work from collecting policies to making sense of them. So, to any data nerds and policy wonks out there: if you are interested in digital platform regulation, data sharing, and the future of urban governance, we’d love to hear from you! Here are some ways to get involved:
Help collect policies - As mentioned earlier, you can send us leads on data sharing mandates we may have missed via our policy submission form here.
Participate in an interview - If you have a story to share about any of the policies or programs we’ve aggregated in the MDSP Hub—especially if you have direct experience drafting, implementing or complying with a data sharing mandate on the public agency or private platform side of things—we are eager to interview you. Sign up for an interview here or else don’t be surprised if we end up in your inbox with an interview request.
Reach out to collaborate or just because - If you are an academic researcher or anyone else interested in collaborating, or even just in chatting us up, feel free to email me at stephenlarrick@hks.harvard.edu
For more information on this publication: Belfer Communications Office
For Academic Citation: Larrick , Stephen.“Introducing The Municipal Data Sharing Mandate Policy Hub .” Perspectives on Public Purpose, February 4, 2022, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/introducing-municipal-data-sharing-mandate-policy-hub.