Show Me the Policies: The Access to Information Problem

Whether for those looking to advance and improve, critique and prevent, or understand and explain platform data sharing policy in cities, a key problem for the field has been a lack of access to user friendly resources for finding and comparing the policy documents themselves, including simply accessing, searching and downloading the text across a variety of local jurisdictions and sharing economy sectors.

This lack of access to comprehensive, searchable, and downloadable policy information for local government platform data mandates is a barrier for multiple stakeholder groups:

• Local Government Officials: City and other local government officials can’t easily see what their peers are doing and learn from them to improve the way data sharing policy is written and implemented.

• Advocates and Community Groups: Advocates and community groups are hard strapped to track and review policy and provide feedback, critique provisions, or hold officials accountable to policy commitments.

• Researchers and Journalists: Researchers and journalists rely on secondhand accounts to understand, evaluate, and explain municipal data sharing policies, often painting policies in broad strokes without being able to dig in to the specific language of the texts.

• Platform Companies: platform companies themselves don’t always know what jurisdictions require what data.

In our preliminary conversations as we began our work, the need seemed most urgent from local government officials who feel increasing pressure to design new policies and programs to enable public-private data sharing.

Cities Need Policy Access

In data sharing mandates, cities have been enacting a novel kind of regulation that operationalizes new digital infrastructures. Data sharing programs require technology expertise to design and administer. Decisions about what platform data to include and why, what level of granularity or frequency to require, and what sorts of privacy minimization and protection commitments to put in place are important. Familiarity with various technical approaches and modern data architectures may be needed to get those decisions right, which can be daunting for agencies that often still own typewriters. And while technical difficulty is high, so are the stakes as a result of the contentious and potentially litigious environment of the sharing economy sector with respect to government access to data. Under these conditions, local government officials need help.

In our conversations, local officials told me they need to be able to manage programs, enforce rules and regulations fairly, evaluate impacts, and set future policy—and they know data can help. At the same time, they expressed hesitance about making something up and getting it wrong, especially technically. As a result, almost all of the officials I spoke to who had drafted data sharing policy mentioned reviewing or even adapting key policy language on data sharing from another jurisdiction.

Informed by not only our own research goals, but our conversations with government officials, our team set out to build a platform urbanism data sharing policy hub that could help local officials more easily discover what peer communities were doing and access example policy language.