Do You Know What That Camera is Doing? Building Trust and Inclusion in Digital Urban Infrastructure

Digital technology is embedded into how our cities work. All around us, sensors are collecting data about the movement of people, objects and vehicles, and the environment. But how can people understand how that data is used to manage our shared spaces? Without transparency and legibility, it’s hard to build public trust in the implementation of these technologies in our communities.

Communities across North America, Australia and France are taking steps to shift this paradigm through their use of Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR), an open-source communication standard to increase transparency, legibility and accountability for digital technology in public places. By using DTPR to make the kind of data collection that’s normally invisible more visible, these communities are creating new feedback pathways and building organizational capacity to deploy smart city technologies in a way that enables inclusion and participation so that trust can be fostered in their use.

This talk will provide the audience with some of the key successes and learnings from past and current implementations of DTPR, and an overview of what’s planned to foster the growth of the open-source standard.