Conceptualising a City Data Plan: a Preliminary Outline of a Data Governance Tool for Smart Cities

This paper presents the conceptualisation of a City Data Plan, a data governance tool for setting schema and protocols to connect the production and use of city data within a comprehensive strategy. A City Data Plan is intended to orient data-enhanced city developments and addressing the current issues related to privacy and manipulation of data generated by smart city technologies. The methodological approach adopted to define the nature of a City Data Plan relied on establishing conceptual and empirical parallelisms with general urban plans and corporate data governance plans.These two policy tools are indeed respectively meant to regulate the different interests of local stakeholders in the access and use of urban resources (that nowadays include data), and to establish decision-making powers and actions on data in enterprise contexts. The result of this analytic process is the formulation of a preliminary outline of a City Data Plan as a data governance tool to support an iterative negotiation between the instances of data producers and users in the city context framed within a long-term evolutive strategy for instantiating shared smart city visions. The conceptualisation of the City Data Plan includes a description of the multi-stakeholder organisational structures for the city data governance, cooperation protocols and decision areas, responsibilities assignments, components of the data governance plan and its implementation mechanisms.