Francesca Bria is Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer of Barcelona. She has over 15 years of experience advising public administrations and companies on science, technology and innovation policy. Francesca works is a Nesta Senior Project Lead at the Nesta Innovation Lab, where she is the EU Coordinator of the D-CENT project and the Principal Investigator of the DSI project on digital social innovation in Europe, as part of the EU CAPS program. She has a background in social science and innovation economics with a PhD from Imperial College London, where she was a Researcher and Teaching Associate in the Innovation Studies Centre- Digital Economy Lab. Francesca is a member of the Internet of Things Council and an advisor for the European Commission on Future Internet and Smart Cities policy. She is also a member of the EC Expert Group on Open Innovation (OISPG) and a member of the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC). She is also active in various grassroots social movements advocating for open access, knowledge and data commons and decentralized privacy-aware technologies.
Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty: Winning Back Technology for the People
While the platform economy has a clear potential to generate economic impact, there are several important issues that need to be resolved: first and foremost, around ownership, control and management of personal data. One key reason cities and municipalities have so far failed to foster local data-intensive platforms that can compete with Uber and Airbnb is missing access to raw data.
Data has become a key part of the urban infrastructure. It helps make better, quicker, and more empirically sound decisions; it promotes socio-economic development and innovation; it improves public services and empowers citizens.
But who should own it? Many technology firms aspire to turn data into a new asset class, the key ingredient of what has been called “surveillance capitalism.” But is this the only option? Can cities embrace a different model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? How can cities help ensure that such data is not locked in corporate silos, but is rather turned into a public good?