Constructing a Public Narrative of Regulations for Big Data and Analytics: Results From a Community-Driven Discussion

Abstract

This article reports on community perspectives about the regulation of municipality-led Big Data initiatives developed through an exploratory, deliberative democracy-informed approach. While analytics hold great promise for policy design and service delivery improvements, their mythologized nature may elicit a blind faith in empirical outcomes, leading to misrepresentation or omission of marginalized populations. Scholars have begun pointing to public consultation as a means of avoiding these challenges, suggesting that a truly “smart city” should vet potential Big Data polices through the community in order to identify locally relevant concerns. The Big Data in Cities: Barriers and Benefits symposium, held in May of 2017, took a deliberative democracy approach designed to contribute toward a midsized southern Ontario city’s regulatory framework for data aggregation and mobilization. Approximately 100 self-selected participants (primarily public advocates) attended a 2-day symposium that featured a series of presentations designed to introduce critiques to and strategies for the implementation of Big Data initiatives. Participants also engaged in several facilitated roundtable discussions during the symposium, and their transcribed conversations served as the data for this study. Thematic analysis identified three recurrent concerns: publicly vetted data ethics, consultation and literacy practices, and regulatory frameworks. The public consultation process employed by this study produced results that reflect critiques raised in other academic papers.