In this episode host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Jacqueline Lu, co-founder of Helpful Places about the transition from traditional hardscapes to digital infrastructure, and how to prioritize trust and transparency while collecting data in the public sphere.
In this episode host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Jacqueline Lu, co-founder of Helpful Places, exploring her journey from public service to spearheading innovative digital privacy initiatives. Lu discusses the challenges and opportunities of deploying digital infrastructure in public spaces, emphasizing the importance of building trust and transparency. They delve into the Digital Trust for Places and Routines standard, its potential to empower communities, and how Helpful Places is driving efforts to reshape data governance and foster inclusive urban environments.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
About Data-Smart City Solutions
Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
This is Betsy Gardner, editor of Data-Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. And you're listening to Data-Smart City Pod, where we bring on the top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
Stephen Goldsmith:
This is Stephen Goldsmith, Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, with another one of our podcasts, and a special guest today: Jacqueline Lu, the present co-founder of the social impact enterprise, Helpful Places, who formerly worked at Mozilla Foundation, Sidewalk Labs, and New York City Parks, a well-recognized excellent place. We originally invited Jacqueline to speak at our second Infrastructure Innovation Summit with the Knight Foundation in Washington DC. We were thrilled to have her there, and here. Welcome Jacqueline.
Jacqueline Lu:
Thanks so much for the introduction, Steve. I'm really excited to be here.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, before we get to Helpful Places and the many interesting things you mentioned in our Infrastructure Innovation Summit, tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are. What did you do in New York City Parks? How about Sidewalk Labs, a well-recognized and interesting initiative, and then how that led to Helpful Places, please?
Jacqueline Lu:
Of course, I'd love to. I do consider myself a bit of a recovering public servant, having spent almost 20 years in New York City government helping lead the Parks Department through various stages of digital transformation. Actually, starting with the very first 311 initiative under the Bloomberg administration, I was part of the team that helped introduce and embed that system into New York City government and also helped along the way, helped develop the geospatial data practice at the Parks Department. So, just dating myself a little bit, when I first started at Parks MapQuest was still new! And so really thinking about the idea of sort of ubiquitous geospatial mapping data was still pretty novel. And so basically, through that my tenure at the city, I helped grow the digital capability at the Parks Department through a few different ways. I worked on the Million Trees initiative under the Bloomberg administration, helping foster research partnerships to understand the impacts of that major initiative under PlaNYC. I also helped develop a project called the New York City Street Tree Map, which was actually one of the biggest crowdsourcing projects of asset management quality geospatial data for New York City Street Trees involved 2,200 volunteers and 60 community groups. And then I also helped establish the innovation and performance management division at Parks, founding sort of departments involvement in the open data program as well as establishing the data analytics team.
So that was really the arc of my public sector career. But then it was time for me to come back home to Canada in Toronto, which is where my family is. And to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do when I first got back here, but there was, as you mentioned, this like little smart city project that not a lot of people had heard about…I'm actually just kidding. Sidewalk Labs was working on a smart city proposal for waterfront Toronto, which is a tripartite government organization working on economic development in the waterfront and with Sidewalk Labs, I was really given the opportunity to think about, well, ‘what does a public realm technology strategy look like?’ If you could really think about starting afresh, if you didn't have a lot of these really challenging conditions around legacy technology and legacy infrastructure, what could it look like to really utilize technology to help improve outcomes for public spaces? But of course, the Sidewalk Labs project was controversial. It came along with quite a bit of concern from members of the public as well as actually from really voices around the world. What does it mean to have these increasingly digitalized public spaces? And so, sort of thinking about that and thinking about technology governance became a bigger and bigger part of my portfolio as the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto went on, and really Helpful Places and the origin of Helpful Places is connected to that story.
It's a social impact enterprise, we really seek to sort of shift norms on how technology is being deployed in the built environment.
And we came into being in 2020 after the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto was sunset, for a variety of reasons, and really Helpful Places came to be because we ran an open-source project called Digital Trust for Places and Routines. And we'll cover that in a little bit. But really the open-source project was pointed at the question, ‘how could you let residents and visitors in a smart district understand the digital layers that increasingly overlay those spaces? What are the mechanisms and avenues for people to learn about those technologies and to follow up?’ And basically, in the sort of end days of the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto, we were starting to get some traction actually from the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston. And I wanted to continue that work and that's really how Helpful Places came, came about and became the focus of what I'm working on now.
Stephen Goldsmith:
That is a lot of stuff. So let's take it piece by piece, you know, big theme of our Infrastructure Innovation event with Knight was thinking about digital infrastructure, ‘what is digital infrastructure?’ And Betsy and I wrote a paper, Betsy Gardner and I at the Kennedy School on digital infrastructure. So, if we thought the conference where you spoke about sensors, data collecting capabilities and the like, not just hardscape. When I was deputy mayor, that's when we first started asking the question, ‘why do you need 10,000 pay phones when nobody uses a payphone?’ And as you know, that evolved to LinkNYC which is the pay phone pedestals became essentially a kiosk. So talk to us a little bit about before we get to the utilization of the data and the challenges with the utilization of the data, how cities should think about this issue of reimagining assets for purposes of providing digital services.
Jacqueline Lu:
Sure. And I think that you hit the thing right on the head, which is that the infrastructure is not just hardscape anymore. It's also about how that infrastructure includes sensors and algorithms, and those sensors and algorithms increasingly measure and automate the decisions that define how our communities work. And actually, something that Anthony Foxx at that Infrastructure Summit said really resonated to me. He said, you know, ‘well, history has shown how these big infrastructure investments can really result in marginalization and discrimination.’ And so I think the thing to think about when we think about these digital infrastructures is ‘how do we build equity and participation into the design and deployment of those technologies? And how do we bring people into these conversations around the design and deployment of digital technologies in much the same way we do for physical infrastructure?’
If you look at urban planning processes around the world, there is the sort of well known, you know, a change is coming to the site sort of zoning that is about an opportunity for residents to participate in decision making about how their community is going to work and how their communities are going to be shaped. And so one thing that I've been very interested in is ‘what does a similar process look like for digital infrastructure?’ If these digital infrastructures do have the opportunity to sort of really shape the way communities can work, how are we building trust in the adoption process of these new technologies? How do we think about protecting privacy, algorithmic transparency, or even just making sure that technology is even responsive to the needs of residents is about having, I think, an alignment process or processes in place that allows everyone who might be affected by these changes to have the chance to understand how they work what some of the tradeoffs are and have the opportunity to be involved.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, you work a lot and talk quite a bit about trust. And as those of us who followed Sidewalk Labs know there was a – not necessarily blaming anybody, but there was a trust question on who owned what data. So, what is digital trust for places and routines and how does that help solve or address this issue?
Jacqueline Lu:
So digital technology, as you noted, is increasingly embedded into how our cities work. And I think the question that Digital Trust for Places and Routines or DTPR started out to try to solve is actually how people can understand how that data is being used to manage those shared spaces and the decisions that these technologies are making, I think without transparency and legibility, it's really hard to build public trust in the implementation of these technologies. You know, one of the questions that we're seeking to solve when we started the DTPR project is how do you let people know what these digital layers are that we had advanced at Sidewalk Labs. What was at the time a novel data governance proposal around creating a multi stakeholder data trust, but that actually didn't help answer the question that most people on the street actually have, ‘which is what is this doing and how do I learn about it and how do I learn who's accountable?’
So that's really the problem that Digital Trust for Places and Routines seeks to solve. It's a data standard that has a visual expression and it is intended to help create sort of standardized information around these digital infrastructure technologies, make this sort of data collection that's normally invisible far more visible and create a feedback pathway for residents to be able to actually participate in these conversations about smart city technologies so that the trust can be fostered in its use. I think a lot of the challenges around trust in technology is that these are tradeoffs when we think about how we use our personal devices or the data that we provide when we use a website, there's a very clear rubric that could be applied. You could be thinking about ‘how can I be seen? What information am I being provided about me in order for the benefit from this technology to accrue to me?’ I think when we talk about smart city technologies, we know that data is being collected about us. But the balance of that conversation, the balance of that rubric where the benefit actually accrues doesn't come back immediately. To me, it comes back to the group, it comes back to the community. And so, what we're trying to do with DTPR is to provide a way for that sort of trade off to be visible. And then the goal is to be able to really reduce the information asymmetry around the uses of these technologies so that people can be empowered to participate in these conversations.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I'm currently a professor, so my job is to make the simple obtuse. So let me ask an obtuse question. We currently are involved with nine cities that won smart grants from DOT for curb and sidewalk infrastructure. And in those, cities are doing slightly different things. But one question for those cities is ‘how do I bring together multiple vendors with the city to provide a set of solutions?’
So, in that situation, one vendor may aggregate or add to the data that came from the city or another vendor, so you've got a mix of vendors in the city. So as we think about DTPR, Digital Trust for Places and Routines, how could that provide guidance over such a messy environment?
Jacqueline Lu:
So, no that's interesting because I think Digital Trust for Places and Routines, a big part of the implementation that we've piloted, we've worked on with communities so far is around the idea of wayfinding for technology in public spaces.
So, here's a sign about this technology about the purpose, how you can learn, who's accountable, give feedback and learn more. And along the way as we've worked with communities around the world – and we're at 10 and counting – we're increasingly seeing that the ability of these organizations to communicate publicly about what these solutions are doing does start with procurement, right? Does start with that intersection, working with the technology vendors and what we've been in the beginning parts of exploring and some of the utility that we're seeing around the DTPR data standard is it actually could be a lightweight process that you put vendors through to get them to sort of clarify exactly what sort of data they're collecting, how it's being processed, who has access to it, what their retention policies are. It doesn't replace a formal assessment like a privacy impact assessment or an algorithmic impact assessment. But it could be a way to actually try to standardize some of the information coming out of these tech technology vendors so that you could start looking at them in a bit more sort of like comparable way and be able to assess and sort of categorize some of the tradeoffs.
I think we talked about this a bit, this is something that we found working within our initial cohort of DTPR deployments where there seemed to be an emerging value that a data standard like DTPR could actually start to remove some of the marketing and “vendor speak” out of these technology solutions and just sort of get the nuts and bolts of who has access to the data. ‘How is it being used? How is it being aggregated and the retention policies and controls that might be possible around it?’
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, let's stick with the tradeoffs for a second. I think it's an interesting conversation. We have a paper on our site, the Data-Smart City Solutions site, called the Responsive City Cycle. And it basically says if government listens better and reacts faster, it can create trust, it's a different sort of trust and the trust that you mentioned, but related. So that means that some of that cycle is informed by active actions and some passive. And you can think about it like on a website where you can opt out of a set of cookies, or you could not provide your stuff.
Now take yourself back to Sidewalk Labs just for a second, not, not the company per se in Toronto. So, you're on a public street and then six inches later, you're on a private sidewalk and government or private company can react much better with mammoth amounts of information…it just can be highly intrusive. So how do you think about this opt in/opt out, how do you draw the line in a way that allows government to be responsive but not overstep its privacy and security issues?
Jacqueline Lu:
Sure. And I think one of the questions, sort of like sub-questions, and thinking about the possibility of opting out of infrastructure data collection is that a lot of the benefits of those digital infrastructures in being able to enable that decision making and enable that responsiveness comes from network effects. It actually requires, sort of starting to being able to measure everything in order to be able to make objective unbiased decisions.
I actually got really interested in sensors when I was first at the Parks Department in New York City because I'm like, well, 311 data, we're orienting management to 311 complaints. We know there's socio-economic biases there. So, I think in a way talking about the privacy risks related to this sort of digital infrastructure data collection also needs to be balanced or sort of tempered with a discussion of potential bias in sort of limited data collection or reliance on some of these other data streams. I used to really sort of dream about like, well, it would be amazing if instead of managing to 311 complaint solely, we were able to relate that information to infrastructure provided information about the condition of these assets that would be a really important balance to be able to provide. So, I think that's one thing that I think about is that sort of opting out when it comes to these digital infrastructures can actually reduce the potential efficacy of these solutions. And so, there's actually the potential for a negative feedback loop to be started. But I do think, you know, we, we know from the user research that we've done that the ability to have agency, a sense of agency and this is often sort of characterized as the ability to opt out is fundamental to, you know, public participation, it's fundamental to sort of trust building.
And so I think this is where it's not clear to me that the individual consent model is the right one that we should be trying to port over to public spaces. When it comes to these digital public infrastructures, you don't get to opt out of whether a park is being built in your neighborhood, right? You can participate in the process and avenues have been created for you to be able to inform and influence those decisions. But you can't just say, well, I opt out of this public park. And so therefore I'm either not going to use it or it's not going to be built – that's not how communities actually work.
And so I think there's an opportunity to think about collective governance processes when it comes to digital infrastructure that often does have to start at some sort of group or community level. I don't think we understand or have fully imagined what that could look like quite yet.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, let's stick with your park. I only have one or two more questions for you. Let's stick with your park for a second. So, one of the issues we addressed at that night meeting in DC was equity. Some of the cities present had reconnecting communities, grants, others were active in other areas of equity. So how do you think about the use of data for purposes of community engagement, let's just say around the design of the park. Now, whether there's a park, what are better ways than just the angry community meeting to use digital infrastructure to gather opinions about design issues or park issues and the like.
Jacqueline Lu:
So, I think one of the things to think about is again the potential for data to be really objective. I think one of the one of the things that we would often think about in the parks department is, how do we measure utilization, how do we measure who this space is actually serving? And most of the sort of known or common methods for understanding that are very time bound or resource intensive. It might involve conducting a public life study or sort of doing intercept surveys and all of that with, let's just say, let's use a controversial technology, let's say using cell phone location data, you can actually quite granularly really understand, you know, the populations that a park is serving and really be able to start talking about, well, who is this asset for and who is using it in a way that's very different from how we think about planning these processes right now. And I think that though requires data literacy and understanding standing on the part of the public and also for the public sector or for governments to really lean into having that conversation with their residents. Even though unfortunately, I think projects like Sidewalk Labs has created a not small amount of fear around engaging, around engaging in those in those conversations. And I just sort of want to name it, but you know, to pull something from our experience working with the city of Charlotte, which is one of the cities that we're working with.
Thanks to the support of the Knight Foundation, we ran two focus groups with their smart city working group which is comprised of residents from equity deserving populations. And what was really clear in our conversation with them when we started talking about, well, what, what would it take for you to start to trust this technology? How does an intervention like DTPR support or help? When you think about the city, smart city strategy, it became really clear that residents already currently perceive data collection as a one-way street and that their information is this raw material for the city and for external entities. So, they are looking already for greater clarity on how capture of information is being used. And so when you create that opportunity for residents to participate through a transparency standard, like DTPR, it actually then starts to shift the conversation towards like, ‘oh this might actually have the potential to be collaborative.’
We had quotes like ‘using DTPR shows me that the space cares about my questions and wants us to be involved or it helps increase my trust level of these new technologies in public spaces because I know now who you are and what you're trying to do.’ And so I think so much of the sort of trust challenges around use of data and digital infrastructure is because there's a void, there's a void of information. And when there's a void, people will fill that up with worry and anxiety.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Jacqueline, that was great. Let's close with one last question. How about a commercial? What do you do and how do people get a hold of you?
Jacqueline Lu:
Thank you. So, as I mentioned, Helpful Places, we are a social impact enterprise, and we are founded to really look at implementation pathways and coalition building to advance the adoption of Digital Trust for Places and Routines. The main way we do that right now is by working with communities to really understand the value of this idea and how it can help them better serve their constituents and their residents. You can find us at our company website, which is www.helpfulplaces.com. If you're looking for more information about the Digital Trust for Places and Routines standard, you can go to www.dtpr.io and either way you can always email us at hello@helpfulplaces.com.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Excellent. Thank you very much for your time, we're delighted to have you as a guest on our podcast. You've been listening to Jacqueline Lu, the present and co-founder of Helpful Places. Thanks so much.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us @datassmartcities.org. Find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Steven Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.