Digital Policy Salon: A Fast Start

By Ryan McLaughlin and Akshay Kotak

The world may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the global COVID-19 health and economic crisis. After unprecedentedly quick development timelines, a handful of promising vaccines have emerged in North America and Europe, and in Russia and China. Efficacy ranges from 70% (Oxford-AstraZeneca) to over 90% (Pfizer and Moderna), but in all cases, sufficient inoculation would achieve herd immunity.

Immediate success is not guaranteed, and challenges persist. In most countries, the rate of vaccination is not yet reaching targets. Various observers have ascribed the blame on insufficient vaccine supply, lack of trained staff, regulatory roadblocks, or ineffective distribution and logistical plans (which must accommodate vaccine freezers). As shown in Figure 1 below, in Canada, as of January 11th, about 20,000–40,000 vaccinations were being performed per day. To vaccine roughly 50% of the population within 6 months, this rate will need to rise to about 100,000 per day.

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By Faun Rice, Tyler Farmer, and Rob Davidson

On November 20, 2020, Rob Davidson, Tyler Farmer, and Faun Rice hosted a Smart Cities community engagement panel with a Vancouver audience, under the theme of “Redesigning Urban Centres in Light of COVID-19.” The event was intended to gather feedback on opportunities that Vancouver participants saw for their city: attendees were asked to reflect on the changes they would like to see in urban planning, data governance, and mobility following the pandemic. This article summarizes the event, including participants’ comments and ideas for the City of Vancouver. 

More multimodal mobility infrastructure is a necessary complement to any increase in mobility pricing. The City of Vancouver is running a feasibility study on transport pricing for downtown core access for vehicles. Participants had mixed feelings about this study. Several noted that this could disadvantage individuals who still needed to commute in and out from areas with low public transit access, contending that public transit coverage would need to be more robust (or more advanced multi-modal transport integration achieved) to avoid disadvantaging some neighbourhoods disproportionately. The trend toward “micro-mobility,” including more walking and biking, was considered positive, in part because of its assumed contribution to public health — participants anecdotally noted an uptick in cycling activity (perhaps due to public transit fears) and requested more bike lane infrastructure and traffic management tools.

Long-term planning needs to consider the permanence or impermanence of different public space uses. Another question the group considered was the longevity of all of COVID-related behaviour changes. In the coming years when a vaccine is available, which trends will reverse and which will stay the same? For example, public transit could rebound or carry a lasting stigma as a place for disease transmission. Participants suggested examining data from other cities and previous health crises to understand which urban patterns endured. One member of the group suggested that public sentiment will be a powerful force in this matter in North American. For example, changes that people wanted even before the pandemic — such as extending restaurant patios into alleys and streets or being able to work from home — would be likely to stick around.

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You’re invited to join Mairead Matthews, Research & Policy Analyst at the Digital Think Tank by ICTC, along with her distinguished panel of guests as they explore the relationship between technology, accessibility, and social impact.

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CES2021 got underway this Monday January 11–14, with 1960 exhibitors and 67,600 attendees. Not a bad turnout considering the entire electronics conference is virtual this year. But those numbers are still a long ways off of last year’s 4400 exhibitors and 170,000 attendees trekking across three major Las Vegas convention venues.

This year — as in 2019 — Verizon’s chairman and chief executive officer Hans Vestberg gave the opening keynote speech. Not surprisingly, the wireless, fiber-optic and global Internet networks executive spoke about 5G. Again.

“In 2020, one thing became very obvious, very quickly as COVID-19 began to spread around the world. We leapfrogged five to seven years in the digital revolution,” Vestberg said. “We knew it was coming but it was closer than we realized.”

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Dozens of presentations took the online stage on Day 2 of CES 2021. Here’s a snapshot of a panel discussion on overcoming the barriers to the growth and acceptance of AI in healthcare. Doctor Jesse Ehrenfeld, Chair, Board of Trustees, American Medical Association (AMA) summed up the challenge as an issue of trust.

“The AMA has been thinking about AI and its impact on the practice of medicine for several years from a couple of lenses,” he said. “When you think about what’s the rate-limiting factor to innovation and transformation, it’s not the technology; it’s that interface between the human and the machine. And at the centre that interface is trust.”

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The crowdsourced encyclopedia is a welcome oddity on the modern internet.

On January 15th Wikipedia—“the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”—will celebrate its 20th anniversary. It will do so as the biggest and most-read reference work ever. Wikipedia hosts more than 55m articles in hundreds of languages, each written by volunteers. Its 6.2m English-language articles alone would fill some 2,800 volumes in print. Alexa Internet, a web-analysis firm, ranks Wikipedia as the 13th-most-popular site on the internet.

Yet Wikipedia is an oddity. It defies the Silicon Valley recipe for success. The site has no shareholders, has generated no billionaires and sells no advertising. Today’s aspiring tech giants burn vast quantities of investors’ money subsidising taxi rides (Uber) or millennial messaging (Snap) in pursuit of “scale”. Wikipedia grew organically, as more and more ordinary people decided to contribute. The site has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education and enlightenment.

Wikipedia is nothing like the other encyclopedias. On top of this, everyone’s favourite online encyclopedia is quite unlike most other things online. Wikipedia is a non-profit, doesn’t sell advertisements, and has a distinct collaborative spirit. Still, one strange tech parallel makes some sense: Wikipedia, as a decentralized open public ledger that requires consensus to operate, is a bit like a more in-vogue tech phenomenon: blockchain. Both capture an element of optimism about ‘web 2.0’ and its capacity to enable democratic processes – optimism that has been blunted over the last decade. If anything has been a beacon for this sort of optimism during the last 10 years, it has been Wikipedia. - Khiran O'Neill

In September, we shared a visualization of COVID-19 case numbers over time, in Toronto. At the time, we wrote that “a second wave appears to be beginning before our eyes”. Regrettably, throughout Canada, the second wave of the pandemic has struck, and fiercely. Click here for an interactive version, unfortunately featuring far more red now than in September.