Barcelona Digital City Plan 2015-2019
* Policy Report: Barcelona digital city: Putting technology at the service of people. Ajuntament de Barcelona / Barcelona City Council,
URL = https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/sites/default/files/pla_barcelona_digital_city_in.pdf
Description
Francesca Bria:
"The Barcelona Digital Plan, co-created with the city’s innovation ecosystem for rethinking the smart city, aims to transcend its merely technological objectives, to rethink a smart city that serve its citizens. At the core of the Barcelona’s model there is a large scale participatory experiment powered by a digital participatory platform, Decidim that taps into the collective intelligence of citizens to create policies that better respond to their needs. It is built with free software and guarantees personal privacy and public transparency in a way commercial platforms don’t. We used Decidim to create the government agenda over 70 per cent of the proposals come directly from citizens. Those proposals highlighted what Barcelona’s citizens care about and thus became the priorities for the government’s Roadmap: issues such as access to affordable housing, climate change, energy transition and sustainability lie at its core.
Our Digital Gov Plan outlines new directives that put citizens first; establish the use of agile methods for ICT projects and advocate for technological sovereignty. Such measures insist on re-establishing control over data and information generated by digital technologies as well as promoting public digital infrastructures based on free and open source software, open standards and adopting privacy-enhancing and rights-preserving technologies that protects citizen's information-self-determination.
The Plan also includes an ethical data strategy, which recognizes data sovereignty, privacy, encryption, collective rights to data and other fundamental citizens’ rights as its core values. We believe that city data is a common good and a public infrastructure like water, electricity, roads, and clean air. Data should be openly accessible, helping the local tech companies and local production networks to build future data-driven and AI fuelled services and solutions that can create public value and social return.
That’s why we are promoting practical alternatives, such as the DECODE project, an open source, decentralised, privacy-aware and rights-respecting data platform based on the blockchain that give back to citizens greater control and power over their data, and enable them to decide what kind of data they want to keep private, what data they want to share, with whom, on what basis. This is a New Deal on data, which does not exploit personal data to pay for critical infrastructure. In this way, the immense economic value that such data represents should be returned back to citizens. This is a decisive change that puts people first in the design of government services and reinforces their digital rights.
Barcelona aspires to evolve the smart city Agenda towards becoming a digital sovereign city – a city which empowers citizens to discuss and articulate their own priorities, set direction as well as decide upon ethical uses of technological innovations with clear social impact and public return. This transition process entails revitalising our economy and rethinking the future of work in an age of automation and robotization, and democratise production in the 4th industrial revolution with the goal of supporting more circular, inclusive, and collaborative economic models. This is what we are doing by creating an urban innovation lab, and supporting makers’ communities, the Fab City movement, and a real sharing economy.
This includes making public procurement more transparent, and sustainable through an open digital marketplace that facilitates the participation of local startups and small and medium companies.
Cities of course cannot do this big transformation alone. Everything we develop is open source, and all the code is posted on Github, so that our ideas and practices can spread.
Barcelona’s digital policies are based on a free software platform so they can be shared, reused and adapted by other cities. This will lay the foundations for a people centric digital future. Our broader goal - hunderpinned by our strong belief in democratic and sovereign cities that enhance rather than undermine common good – is to ensure that the digital revolution is serving the many, not just the few."