Abstract
City governments increasingly experiment with civic participation in the procurement and the realization of smart city technologies in order to improve the incorporation of human values. In this case study, the city of X changed its procurement approach for a new camera car service that ensures an ethically responsible, privacy-friendly and secure collection of images from public space, including their metadata. Two starting points drive this change: 1) in order to have more control over the data, the municipality develops its own machine learning models for processing the images and 2) a multi-stakeholder co-design project – including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the service to be realized. To support this new procurement process, a group of design-researchers were involved that developed a method to identify requirements relevant for the tender. They arrived at an advice consisting of requirements on four layers: 1) the physical scan car and its presence, 2) the data collection and processing, 3) the procedures and actions in the executive branch and 4) the democratic debate and decision making. In the reflections we show why a considerable number of the requirements that normally would go into the tender to be realized by the contractor, were formulated as process requirements for the co-design. This new procurement approach facilitates ‘doing ethics’ by making iterative exploration of values and their manifestation in actual services possible.
Keywords
public procurement, doing ethics, smart city technology
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.520
Citation
de Kreek, M., Alfrink, K., de Waal, M., Kortuem, G., Turel, T., Visser, B.,and Samson, L.(2023) When 'doing ethics' meets public procurement of smart city technology – an Amsterdam case study, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.520
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When 'doing ethics' meets public procurement of smart city technology – an Amsterdam case study
City governments increasingly experiment with civic participation in the procurement and the realization of smart city technologies in order to improve the incorporation of human values. In this case study, the city of X changed its procurement approach for a new camera car service that ensures an ethically responsible, privacy-friendly and secure collection of images from public space, including their metadata. Two starting points drive this change: 1) in order to have more control over the data, the municipality develops its own machine learning models for processing the images and 2) a multi-stakeholder co-design project – including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the service to be realized. To support this new procurement process, a group of design-researchers were involved that developed a method to identify requirements relevant for the tender. They arrived at an advice consisting of requirements on four layers: 1) the physical scan car and its presence, 2) the data collection and processing, 3) the procedures and actions in the executive branch and 4) the democratic debate and decision making. In the reflections we show why a considerable number of the requirements that normally would go into the tender to be realized by the contractor, were formulated as process requirements for the co-design. This new procurement approach facilitates ‘doing ethics’ by making iterative exploration of values and their manifestation in actual services possible.