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

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...