Once cities collect and process data, the next step is to share the information with end-users, be it internally (within government) or externally (to the public).

This practice of data dissemination and communication involves publishing information via multiple channels to reach different target audiences.

Depending on the objectives at hand, such audiences may be technical (academics, government agencies, subject matter experts, business users) or non-technical (citizens, community organisations, media, politicians). Each of these stakeholders are therefore likely to have different preferences over how data should be shared and presented.

Technical audiences may often be interested in the original, raw data – from which they can construct their own analysis – while non-technical users may be interested in focal results, simplified language and stories to explain key findings.  For any smart city initiative it is critical that governments tailor their approaches to sharing data with each of these different end-users in mind.

Government

Data sharing within government should theoretically be simple, but in practice it is often insufficient for a number of reasons – be it an unwillingness to take on additional administrative responsibilities, a lack of awareness around the benefits of collaboration, ethical and privacy implications related to sharing data, or issues of interoperability between department systems.

Most commonly, city departments simply operate in siloes, they collect and process data for their own purposes, with little knowledge of other department needs. Examples of this might include data from smart water meters collected by utilities companies, or GPS traffic data collected by the transport authority. Such information has clear benefits for other departments beyond their immediate use-cases, for example, water and weather forecast data made available to the disaster control centre, or traffic data to the police and emergency services.

Enforcing data sharing can often be challenging without legal and regulatory mandates, so it is vital that cities form a strong leadership and culture to encourage a collaborative approach. Investing in the required infrastructure is also critical. In many cases, this could simply be a machine-to-machine transfer from one department to another, but to truly embed a culture of collaboration, cities might also consider establishing centralised data portals or intranet services with as much open access rights across all government departments as possible.

Research institutions and civil society

One of the key advantages of sharing data with academia and civil society is that city governments can leverage their research expertise to answer policy questions where the municipality may not have the knowledge or resources to do so in-house. This can save the cost of hiring internal data scientists and free up time to dedicate municipal resources to other matters.

At the same time, research institutions gain the data they need to advance their knowledge base, and may also have other complementary datasets that can help to untangle more interesting or complex policy issues from the original information. Research institutions can also be a critical source of training and capacity building for governments, as well as accelerators for new ideas and technologies that can benefit wider smart city operations.

Private sector

The public sector can make its data available to private companies so they can design and compete on providing low-cost municipal services. At the same time, there is often a large supply of unlocked value in third party, private sector data that can be very useful and cost-effective for policymakers if leveraged effectively, rather than governments recreating it themselves. Standard approaches for public-private data sharing might include procurement contracts – whereby one party pays the other for its data – or for example, in-kind licensing agreements, where companies like Uber pay for their right to operate in cities by making their data on road traffic and routing available to the city.

Open data initiatives

The principle of open data initiatives is to make information freely available to all city stakeholders to use and republish.

The key goals of this process are to promote transparent and accountable leadership, to encourage wider participation in decision-making, and to create a reliable system of data dissemination where citizens are active participants.

With such systems in place, research institutions can study the quality of past policy choices, private companies can develop applications to meet gaps in service delivery, and even citizens can interact with government to raise complaints or ideas to improve municipal services.

Open data initiatives are increasingly being adopted by cities across the world. However, to do so it is important that cities pay attention to certain principles – for instance, ensuring that all data are easily accessible, timely, inter-operable, anonymised, sufficient, non-discriminatory and non-proprietary. Without these, open data initiatives may fail; either they struggle to generate sufficient attention and demand, the process of sharing data becomes overly cumbersome and time-consuming, or the initiative doesn’t adhere to relevant legal and regulatory standards.

A successful data dissemination and communication procedure is likely to involve collaboration between local authorities and various private sector stakeholders, such as technology providers, telecoms companies, software developers and subject matter experts. Technology providers can help with both the infrastructure for data collection – such as sensor-based technologies – as well as the user interfaces for communicating data. The timeliness and quality of information transmission is bound to be subject to the current services the local telecoms companies can provide, while other developers can help to ensure data sharing platforms evolve with the end-user in mind.

Although such collaborations are likely to increase the workload of city staff, there are huge gains to be made from the communication of civic data.