Ontario Makes a Bold Move that Could Define the Standard for Municipal Data Innovation

On April 30, Ontario announced a number of steps it plans to take to make it a “world-leading digital jurisdiction.” Included in the announcement were two items that I think are promising steps towards enabling cities to really benefit from the data they collect today – and the data they’ll collect in the future.?

First, Ontario will start consulting with standards organizations and key sectors on new digital and data standards. Wherever possible, this work will identify standards which will spur innovation and investment, while concurrently addressing issues around digital security and privacy. The work will also be looking at ways to align Ontario with existing standards developed in other regions and countries, which is really important to Ontario companies in this space – like Miovision – that also operate in global markets.?

Second, Ontario has announced Canada’s first provincial data authority. For those that haven’t heard this term before, a data authority is a body tasked with identifying and enabling appropriate uses of data, usually based on a well-defined data governance policy. Basically, it determines who can access data and for what purposes. According to their Building a Digital Ontario strategy, the Ontario public data authority will build a “modern data infrastructure to support economic and social growth at scale, while ensuring that data is private, secure, anonymous and cannot identify people individually.” It aims to “harness the data from the province's infrastructure investments in new ways, creating a new resource that municipalities, entrepreneurs, and local businesses could leverage to innovate in sectors like transportation, clean tech and local planning.”?

While this all may sound fairly abstract, I actually think the concepts outlined could represent foundational moves to enable Ontario to become a world leader in data-driven innovation in the public sector – particularly for municipalities.?

The Challenges These Initiatives Address

My company, Miovision, works with municipalities around the world, providing them with the tools they need to better measure, manage and optimize traffic. We’re part of a wave of new tools municipalities are adopting to measure aspects of civic life and enable more effective, data-driven approaches to managing cities and towns. Miovision currently sees two barriers for municipalities who really want to adopt holistic, data-driven approaches.?

First, municipalities have adopted a bunch of different – often proprietary – data tools over time. This creates a tangle of data, making it really hard to combine and analyse data from multiple systems. If you’ve ever tried to open a document created in one program, in a competing program – opening a really old WordPerfect document in Google Docs, for example –? you’ve experienced first-hand the dilemma: either the document won’t open at all, or it opens with formatting issues that take a lot of time and manual effort to fix. Imagine the same challenge, but with large data sets at a city level and you can see it quickly becomes time consuming and expensive to start combining data from different systems.?

With data, the more data you have, and the more data you can combine, the more useful, and therefore more valuable, the data set becomes. For example, having data on traffic is interesting, but combining traffic data, public transit data and data on available parking is more valuable – you might be able to offer a really sophisticated route planning app for citizens to help them choose the fastest, least expensive, or most environmentally-friendly mode for each trip. The ability to combine all the data a city might be able to collect – everything from the real-time location of garbage trucks or snow plows, to real-time utilities use, to tax revenue – could allow cities to gain valuable new insights in ways that’s difficult to imagine today: optimizing city services, creating new services, and spurring economic development.?

Ontario’s efforts to ensure data is standardized and can be combined and used in whatever systems the city or town wants to use is key to making all the data cities gather more useful.?

But, standardization is only part of the challenge. The second challenge we see is the need for defined governance on how data should be gathered and used.?

As we saw in Toronto when Sidewalk Labs proposed a neighbourhood with new and widespread data collection, what data is collected, who has access to the data, and how that data can be used are all really important questions. Citizens, rightly, have legitimate concerns on transparency, security and privacy that need to be addressed before we start gathering and combining large amounts of data.??

The establishment of a province-wide Data Authority has the potential to address these issues. A data authority could establish clear data governance rules on data collected by municipalities and the province – what gets collected, who has access, how data can be combined, and for what purpose data can and can’t be used for. It could also serve as a governance body and/or repository for public-sector data in Ontario and play an active role in governing access and usage. That would not only give citizens a say – through their elected officials – as to how public data is used. It would also provide the transparency and confidence to allow cities and towns to innovate with the data they collect. Potentially, it could also create a province-wide dataset, creating insights about growth and management at a regional level that could be incredibly useful for everything from environmental stewardship to transportation planning.?

The Opportunity

I applaud the Province of Ontario for their April announcement. They are the first example of a major level of government in Canada taking a material step forward on this issue. The April announcement is just a first step – bringing the right people together to determine what’s possible, but if Ontario does this right, it could enable municipalities to become leaders in data-driven planning and governance – finally making the buzz around ‘smart cities’ a reality. This would in turn help Ontario companies in the smart city sector, including Miovision, access a growing base of innovative domestic customers, which will help us develop into global leaders.?

I’m excited to follow the evolution of Ontario's announcement and am eager to see how it takes shape.?