Jul 6, 2021

Digital Policy Salon: How Does Tech Manifest Our Values?

By ICTC-CTIC • Issue #46 • View online

Welcome to the 46th issue of the Digital Policy Salon briefing.

This week we’re thinking about value. From internet costs to data ethics to TikTok universities, our features raise questions about the impact of technology on our ethics and our wallets. First, our “Policy Update” includes a recently tabled report from the House of Commons on accessible and affordable telecommunications in Canada. In our perspective piece, the ICTC team talks with Halifax residents about what they’d like to see in their “smart city.”

Next up, our feature interview dives into data ethics with Mat Mytka. Mat is the co-founder of Greater Than Learning, a platform that helps businesses operationalize their well-intentioned corporate values and reduce their intention-to-action gap when it comes to data governance.

In this week’s “What We’re Reading” an English Professor infiltrates a self-proclaimed “TikTok university.” Dr. Barret Swanson’s foray into LA content-creating clubhouse For the Boys (FTB) results in a hilarious, yet poignant reflection on the value (or lack thereof) of higher education in an “influencer economy.”

Finally, we hope you’ll join us in early July for a virtual panel with Namir Anani, ICTC’s President and CEO, along with other international experts at “Your Virtual Fingerprint: Digital IDs in a Data-Driven Economy.”

- Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC)

Policy Updates 🇨🇦

Statistics Canada survey shows pandemic’s impact on internet use, INDU committee tables recommendations on affordable internet

The 2020 Canadian Internet Use Survey, which was released by Statistics Canada last week, sheds light on how Canadians’ internet use changed over the course of the pandemic. In 2020:

43 percent of Canadians used the internet to work from home more often, while 15 percent used the internet to work from home for the first time
82 percent of Canadians shopped online, up from 73 percent in 2018, while online spending rose from $57.4 to $84.4 billion

Also last week, the House of Commons INDU committee tabled its report on the affordability and accessibility of telecommunications services in Canada, including 16 policy recommendations towards more affordable high-speed internet.

Canada speeds up zero-emissions light-duty vehicle target following International Energy Association net-zero report

The federal government is speeding up its zero-emissions light-duty vehicle target by five years following the release of the International Energy Association (IEA)’s net-zero roadmap. According to the new target, all new light-duty vehicle sales should be zero emissions by 2035. Transportation is the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, and light-duty passenger vehicles account for the largest portion of transportation emissions.

From June 1st to July 9th, Invest in Canada and Electric Autonomy Canada are holding a series of webinar discussions on Canada’s role across the electric vehicle battery value chain, from battery research and development to reuse and recycling.

New report estimates clean energy’s labour market impact from now until 2030

According to a recent report by Clean Energy Canada, Canada’s clean energy sector currently employs approximately 430,500 people and, under the federal government’s new climate plan, will employ approximately 639,200 by 2030. Clean Energy Canada is a climate and clean energy program based out of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

Toronto-based hyperloop company completes feasibility study on Calgary-Edmonton hyperloop

Canadian hyperloop company TransPod has completed the feasibility study for its proposed hyperloop between Calgary and Edmonton. A hyperloop is a mode of high-speed transport whereby “vehicles travel autonomously through a network of low-pressure tubes,” “guided and propelled electromagnetically.”

According to the study, the project would cost $29.1 billion, while creating an average of 15,556 jobs/year for nine years and reducing the province’s carbon emissions by 636,000 tonnes/year.

Standards Council of Canada publishes roadmap for data governance standardization

The Canadian Data Governance Standardization Collaborative (CDGS) published its roadmap for data governance standardization this week. The roadmap “builds on the recommendations of the Digital Charter and puts standardization into action,” including 35 recommendations towards data standardization. The CDGS is a group of 220 Canadians from government, industry, civil society, Indigenous organizations, academia, and standards development organizations. - Mairead Matthews

Our Perspective

Let’s Talk Smart Cities: Halifax Regional Municipality

Tyler Farmer

On March 30th, 2021, ICTC hosted its third (virtual) community engagement session, this one in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), the capital of Nova Scotia. The city is located within Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. ICTC’s community engagement event was designed to gather insights from city residents on the evolution of Halifax and its surrounding areas. Attendees were asked to reflect on how the past year — living with a global pandemic — has shaped their perceptions of community needs, opportunities for economic growth and prosperity, social impacts and inclusivity, labour market shifts, and the role of technology.

The concept of a “smart city” is not new; in its purest form, a “smart city” is simply one that uses technology to manage resources and infrastructure more effectively to improve the well-being of its residents. Although high technology is often associated with a smart city, smart city projects need not involve things like high-tech sensors, predictive models, or digital twins: smart solutions can also be low tech. Halifax’s own Smart Cities Challenge bid looked to improve access to nutritious, affordable food for every resident, by making the city a more equitable place to live — in so doing, Halifax vowed to turn itself into the “most food secure community in the country.” Unbeknownst to many, Halifax, despite its record growth and wealth of natural assets, is one of the most food insecure cities in Canada. In 2012, the city had the highest rate of household food insecurity of 33 Census Metropolitan Areas across the country. Although there has been improvement over the last five years, today, one in five households in Halifax are moderately or severely food insecure.

Read the full article here 📝

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Special Events

You're Invited to a Virtual Panel Discussion on Digital IDs and the Digital Data-Driven Economy

On July 8th, 11 am-12 pm EDT, ICTC in partnership with DIACC invites you to join Namir Anani, ICTC President and CEO, for a virtual panel engaging with North American experts and learn more about digital IDs and their role in an increasingly data-driven economy.

Digital IDs are a form of virtual and reliable proof of identity. For governments, they have the potential to reduce the administrative burden alongside the risk of fraud. For individuals, access to a variety of services, both public and private, can be streamlined and made more convenient.

This virtual panel will provide:

An overview of the digital data-driven economy
An explanation of the relationship between digital access and authentication
An understanding of Digital IDs and their varied use cases in Canada and internationally
An exploration of policies that can drive Digital ID implementation and adoption in Canada

*A question and answer session will follow the presentations allowing participants to interact with the panelists.

Register here 🗓

www.eventbrite.ca • Share

Interviews in the Field

Designing Durable Values: A conversation with Mat Mytka on the ethical intent to action gap in tech

Faun Rice

Mustering the energy and expertise to vigilantly protect your privacy as a user of technology is a challenging feat. If it’s even possible to do well, it might necessitate a refusal to use popular apps and websites. First, however, platform monopolies make that choice more extreme (do I want to avoid personal data collection more than I want to stay in touch with international friends and family?). And second, similar technologies are increasingly a part of essential services, such as immigration, grocery shopping, or contact tracing. Leaving the consumer to donate their data unconditionally or opt out of digital society is an unfair burden. What might a better system look like?

After checking out ICTC’s recent Responsible Innovation report, Mat Mytka reached out to talk about his experience as an educator in data ethics. Mat’s Greater than Learning platform helps businesses work data ethics into their key performance indicators (KPIs) to help reduce the ethical intention-to-action gap (the difference between what people plan to do and what they actually do) in corporate values. Across radically different time zones — Mat is based in Australia — we got into a conversation on operationalizing data ethics principles, the challenges facing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), and Mat’s pilot of a new corporate structure, a platform cooperative, to reduce the conflicts of interest in responsible innovation work.

Faun: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat today. Before we get into some of these case studies, could we hear a bit about your journey to working in the responsible tech field?

Mat: About 13 years ago, I returned to university as a mature student. I got interested in how the digital technology age influences the way that we think, behave, and interact. This was 2008. Facebook was only a few years old. At the time, you sounded a little bit like a conspiracy theorist if you were talking about the subtleties of digital technologies collecting information and creating feedback loops, and how these influence people’s behaviour, actually changing the way a person interacts and thinks about themselves.

Fast forward a few years, I co-built a service business called Greater than X that was really operating at the intersection of privacy, trust, and ethics in the context of the information sharing economy. Through this work, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of some of the challenges that businesses face, including how they are constrained by shareholder primacy, as well as the types of metrics and incentives that they have. And this really piqued my intellectual curiosity, because these are systemic problems that are really hard to solve. It requires a lot of systems thinking to even understand the problems in the first place. We got a little bit deeper into the areas of responsible innovation, working with big Fortune 500 companies, and national governments on information sharing initiatives. And that’s helped me to empathize a lot, actually, with decision-makers who wanted to build technology that helped people and didn’t create externalities or downstream consequences, be that in machine learning or in the way that privacy needs to be baked into information sharing initiatives in a kind of national context.

And that’s spurred on a whole bunch of thinking around developing a learning platform to help in some way. So that’s the trajectory I’ve been on, which has led me to be interested in this area of responsible innovation and technology.

Faun: And now you run this educational platform, Greater than Learning, which helps companies to operationalize data ethics. Could you share some thoughts on why this is needed, and what strategies you use?

Mat: For sure, and I’ll begin with a challenge: one of the problems that we had as an organization was where to start, what empirically validated approaches have been tested in market to help organizations achieve set outcomes. And there is a huge amount of overlap. There’s quite a lot of universality to values, for instance; there’s universal human values and virtues that underpin a lot of the ways people think and interact in society. And there is a lot of duplication of effort, a lot of people saying, “Check out this new approach,” when they’re really regurgitating the same stuff. A lot of these value-based frameworks tend to be hard to take action on. They require a lot of interpretation.

Read the full interview here 🎙

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What We're Reading

The Anxiety of Influencers

(Harper’s Magazine)

“Do you want to be in a TikTok?” Gio asks, sometime before noon that morning. He says this with the gentle-voiced decorum of a duke asking a governess to dance. For a second I wonder whether he’ll reach for my hand. “It’s just fun,” he says. While I never would have dreamed of asking the boys to include me in their content—lest I earn that most ignominious of labels: clout chaser—I nevertheless admit that during my trip to L.A. I did entertain certain gauzy-edged daydreams about possibly busting a move in a Clubhouse video and thereupon earning praise from millions of TikTok users. But now that it’s actually happening and Gio is wrangling Baron and Christopher to help him, I am undergoing such booming levels of pulse-in-ears trepidation that I can’t help feeling like the millennial that I am.

Christopher pauses over a number where the TikToker in question turns to the side and, in the manner of a pugilist warding off blows to the head, raises clenched fists over his face and proceeds to thrust his hips blindly, with prurient torque and velocity. “What about this one?” Christopher says. “Uhh,” I say. Do the boys know anything about academic tenure?”

Talking Points:

This charming long read has an air of science fiction or anthropology—“what if there was a mansion for children who sold their lives to companies for room, board, and fame, and the narrator was a cultural outsider who had to participate”—but amidst the good story are several compelling lessons. Immersed in LA content-creating clubhouse For the Boys (FTB), English Professor Barret Swanson reflects on digital literacy (see “Yo, Hitler invented sex dolls”) and TikTok’s reputation as a truth-to-power platform. The young influencers have shot to stardom from humble beginnings, but their soapbox is only as radical as the brands supporting their lifestyles. In the final scenes, the observer turns the lens on himself and his role as an English Professor, questioning in part whether higher education has the tools to cope with the anxieties born from the internet age. – Faun Rice

harpers.org • Share

Our Research

Smart Cities, Smart Government: ICTC Policy Roundtable on Smart Government in Canada

A vibrant and inclusive smart economy will increasingly depend on “smart” governments that harness technology to enhance its decision-making and services. A digital transformation of all levels of government calls upon new skills and a culture of innovation that builds on collaboration between experts and citizens.

“In tomorrow’s smart economy, the construct of connected governments is critical for continuing to heighten citizen engagement, expand on-demand services, and encourage innovations. Good data governance will be critical for delivering better outcomes for citizens and businesses.” - Namir Anani, ICTC President and CEO

The construct of smart government furthers critical facets of inclusion and accessibility, fostering equitable access to technology, technology devices, infrastructure, and digital literacy.

A key component of community inclusion and citizen engagement is data collection and sharing, which will underscore the need to ensure privacy for citizens. This will mean designing systems with privacy in mind from the outset, helping the public understand the value of privacy, and effective regulation.

ICTC’s policy roundtable unveils trends on the make up of smart governance to support a vibrant and inclusive smart economy. These are some of the insights gathered from the fourth in a series of six Smart City Policy Roundtables hosted by ICTC. It took place online in March 2021 on the topic of Smart Government and brought together more than 30 thought leaders from across Canada.

Dr. Ann Cavoukian, former Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario and inventor of Privacy by Design, provided a keynote presentation at the start of the roundtable.

Read the full policy brief here 📖

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Twitter Highlights

ICTC-CTIC

@ICTC_CTIC

Our Capacity Building and Innovation team is looking for an experienced Career Coach & Facilitator! Do you love identifying the training required for occupations and skills in demand and offering soft skills training? If so, this may be the role for you!

https://t.co/sViyqpHxyc https://t.co/e4vw0cFcA8

9:36 AM - 30 Jun 2021

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