Digital Policy Salon: Biodiversity Tech and Other Under-Resourced Fields

On June 10th, 2021 Tech Manitoba in partnership with ICTC will be holding a public engagement session via Zoom to discuss the state of Winnipeg’s technology ecosystem and Canada’s smart cities project.

We want to meet and connect with Winnipeg residents on issues and opportunities impacting you, and how smart cities technology may play a role.

Register here 🗓

Effective species conservation requires data. High-risk species, however, are often the least surveyed. A new study detailing the devastating impact of white-nose syndrome (WNS) aims to disrupt this paradox. The study represents the most comprehensive dataset on hibernating bat species to date. Researchers found that, in under a decade, white-nose syndrome (WNS) killed more than 90% of little brown, northern long-eared, and tri-coloured bat populations in parts of Canada and the United States. Big brown bat and Indiana bat populations also saw moderate to serious declines. Data for this study was collected using high-tech and low-tech interventions, including roost counts and mobile acoustic surveys.

These surveying technologies and data-driven collaborations continue to improve conservation efforts. Indeed, the use of sensors and AI-assisted sound identification tools for bat management is becoming more common place. While technology has a role to play in conservation science, time-tested low-tech interventions including bat-boxes are often equally, if not more, effective. The loss of bat life due to WNS make these questions about the role of technology in biodiversity management a pressing issue.

The Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) recently spoke with James Watson as part of ICTC’s new Green Tech Series, to help us unravel these questions. James is the full-time Director of Sales and Marketing at Semios Technologies and part-time bat conservation leader, based in British Columbia. Maya Watson, Research and Policy Analyst with ICTC, interviewed James about his conservation work with North and West Vancouver municipalities to create and conserve habitats for bats. In this interview, James and Maya discuss the primary threats to Canadian bat populations and delve into low-tech and high-tech interventions to conserve bats.

Read the full interview here 🎙

Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, is poised to transform the manufacturing sector. In its recent report, Just Press “Print”: Canada’s Additive Manufacturing Ecosystem, ICTC found that the global AM ecosystem is growing at a brisk 24% a year and is set to generate US $35.0 billion of revenue a year by 2024.

AM represents a diverse group of technologies and manufacturing processes which can be used with materials ranging from plastic filament to resins to metal powders. Use cases for AM range from rapid prototype, to customization, to the creation of highly complex manufactured goods that are cost-prohibitive or impossible to make with other technologies.

Following the release of the ICTC report, Just Press “Print”: Canada’s Additive Manufacturing Ecosystem, ICTC’s Chris Herron spoke with AM entrepreneur Zander Chamberlain about his work in AM and the state of AM in Canada.

Read the full interview here 🎙

Simply erasing things from the internet comes at a cost. It might not be worth it.

There will surely never be a return to the old days, when platforms such as Facebook and Twitter tried to wash their hands of the bulk of what happened on their sites with faith that internet users, as a global community, would magically govern themselves. But a slow and steady march toward a future where ever more problems are sought to be addressed by trying to erase content from the face of the internet is also a simplistic and ineffective approach to complicated issues. The internet is sitting at a crossroads, and it’s worth being thoughtful about the path we choose for it. More content moderation isn’t always better moderation, and there are trade-offs at every step. Maybe those trade-offs are worth it, but ignoring them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

“Just delete things” removes content but not its cause. It’s tempting to think that we can content-moderate society to a happier and healthier information environment or that the worst social disruptions of the past few years could have been prevented if more posts had just been taken down. But fixing social and political problems will be much harder work than tapping out a few lines of better code. Platforms will never be able to fully compensate for other institutional failures.

Two critiques of content moderation appear most often. The first is that content moderation practices themselves are imperfect. Most notably, this critique highlights the plight of people who work as content moderators and face the psychological toll of sifting through content deemed too violent or obscene for the rest of us. The second major critique of content moderation arises as a central question in this article: how do we decide (and who gets to decide) what should not exist on a platform? This article, however, does not get stuck in a tired “where’s the line” debate. Rather, it advocates for moderating moderation. In short, there’s hypocrisy in moderating—i.e., avoiding extremes—by removing controversial material entirely, because deletion is essentially the most extreme form of content management. An alternate title for this article might be “Better Content Moderation is Better.” It highlights more creative means of moderating content than straightforward deletion, for example by suggesting that people read entire stories, rather than just their title, before sharing them. On that note, we recommend reading the article above before tweeting about it. - Khiran O'Neill

Akshay Kotak and Khiran O'Neill

Autonomous Vehicle Scientist, Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Innovation Consultant, Chief Resiliency Officer—these are just a few of the emerging roles that increasing investments in smart cities are creating. Each role will entail specific technical skills, soft skills, and certifications.

Spending on smart city projects worldwide was estimated at $608.3 billion (USD) in 2019 and, despite the pandemic, the spend increased to $679.5 billion (USD) in 2020. Along with globalization, urbanization, and rapid digital disruption, smart city investments will impact existing jobs and drive demand for new occupations in this evolution of work.

Emerging roles (defined as currently non-existent or rare) in this report are grouped into five subject areas:

Across all five categories, future skill needs will likely be centered around data and digital literacy combined with strong soft skills. Similarly, progressive career experience and professional or technical degrees will likely remain highly valued.

Although numerous junior-level occupations are likely to emerge in the smart cites of the future, senior-level roles currently drive global smart city developments, so the focus of this report is on professionals in senior positions.

These discussed occupations were identified through a literature review of emerging smart city roles, key informant interviews, and skills data associated with the five categories. Role evaluations includes a description of their creation and evolution, their accompanying responsibilities, backgrounds, skills, and team structures.

Read the full report here 📖