Great chat with the Civic Tech group in Ottawa hosted at https://rebel.ca/ in the Market Area

1. Session #28:
Ottawa Civic Tech
Data & Tech Citizenship
June 6th, 2017
Tracey P. Lauriault
Assistant Professor, Critical Media and Big Data
Communication and Media Studies
School of Journalism and Communication
Carleton University
@traceylauriault
Tracey.Lauriault@Carleton.ca

2. Data and everyday life

3. Data are even a platform!

4. Are more than the unique arrangement of
objective and politically neutral facts
&
they do not exist independently of ideas,
techniques, technologies, systems, people and
contexts regardless of them being presented in
that way
Data – big or small
Tracey P. Lauriault, 2012, Data, Infrastructures and
Geographical Imaginations. Ph.D. Thesis, Carleton
University, Ottawa,
http://curve.carleton.ca/theses/27431

5. Books

6. Framing Data
1. Technically
2. Ethically
3. Politically &
economically
4. Spatial/Temporal
5. Philosophically

7. Sociotechnical Assemblage (Kitchin 2014)

8. 2 Projects
Open Smart Cities
• Funded:
• GeoConnections
• Lead:
• Open North
• Partners:
• Tracey P. Lauriault
• Mark Fox
• David Fewer, CIPPIC
• Cities of Ottawa, Guelph,
Edmonton and Montreal
Making Data Matter: analyzing the
material effects of big data use in the
Agrifood sector
• Funded:
• SSHRC Insight Development Grant
• Lead/PI:
• Kelly Bronson
• Co-Applicant:
• Irena Knezevic
• Collaborators:
• Tracey P. Lauriault
• Merlyna Lim
• Paul Peters

9. Smart & Intelligent Discourse

11. Actors
• GE
• CISCO
• INTEL
• SIEMENS
• IBM
• Microsoft

12. Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University

14. What will be encoded?

16. Rights & Principles
1. The right to remain natural, i.e. ‘merely’ biological
and organic
2. The right to be inefficient if, when and where it
defines our basic humanness
3. The right to disconnect
4. The right to be, or remain anonymous
5. The right to employ or engage people instead of
machines
6. The right to data sovereignty
7. Technological citizenship

17. Smart Questions?
What is the fate of cities and agriculture
/ Food Security
• in the platform economy?
• in the sharing economy?
• in a smart city / precision agriculture?
• w/ predictive policing?
• in a safe (surveillance) city?
• w/ big data & machine learning?
• w/ AI, autonomous vehicles & drones?
• in the Internet of Things (IoT)?
• Blockchain?
• Robots?
• Technological inequality?
What does engagement look like
in a machined environment?
• Civic technology?
• Open Data? Open Source? Open
Firmware?
• Ownership?
• Technology & algorithms & data?
• Machines instead of people
• Who governs?
• Human centrered approaches?

19. Discussion
• What is the role of Civic Technology in the smart city and in
precision agriculture?
• Can there be a discussion with technology as form political
discourse?
• Is there such a thing as technological citizenship?