Designing Data Governance for Data Sharing: Lessons from Sidewalk Toronto

Abstract

This paper considers data governance for data sharing through the lens of the data governance scheme proposed by Sidewalk Labs as part of its Master Innovation Development Plan (MIDP) for a ‘smart city’ development on the waterfront of Toronto, Canada. Recognizing the diverse interests in the data that might be collected in the development, the MIDP called for the creation of an Urban Data Trust (UDT) as a data governance body to address both the collection and the sharing of the novel category of ‘urban data’. This paper uses the example of urban data and the UDT to illustrate some of the challenges that are central to data governance for data sharing and offers a critique that draws upon the idea of governance of a knowledge commons. The paper identifies some of the issues that led to the failure of the UDT, and extracts key lessons.

Keywords: data governance, smart cities, privacy, data protection, data ownership, data sharing, data trust