Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Entry 11: The MIDP Overview II: Project Background

Posted on July 26, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries available here

The Overview consists of a Foreword (pp. 26-27) not listed in the table of contents) and four sections, three of which correspond to the other three volumes and one of which provides the background to the whole project.

Also, lots and lots and lots of pretty pictures.

This post provides a part-by-part overview of the Overview’s first section, Project Background. Fun fact: the Overview’s Table of Contents doesn’t list every part in this (or subsequent) sections! Huzzah for transparency!

Subsequent posts will cover the remainder of the Overview, followed perhaps by some more targeted analyses. Then it’ll be on to the other volumes. Let’s dive right in.

Section A: Project Background

Five things to know about the Sidewalk Toronto Project (pp. 36-37; not listed in the Table of Contents)

Summary of the MIDP’s three volumes (pp. 38-39; not listed in the Table of Contents)

Part 1: Toronto Waterfront: A Historic Opportunity for Inclusive Growth (pp. 42-53)

Four pages devoted to pictures and eight devoted to seize-the-moment rhetoric and building up (pun unintended) Waterfront Toronto, which, we are informed in a moment of pure Lionel Hutz over-reach, was “Born to raise the bar on urban development” (p. 46).

Part 2: Seeking a “Unique Partner” to Help Set New Standards for City Building (pp. 54-65)

Most of this section (and the report to this point) reads like a sales pitch, including pitching a parade of horribles to which this particular smart city design is the solution, but it does hold two interesting tidbits.

Donwplaying your main calling card: From “from the internet up” to “from the community up”

First, Sidewalk Labs engages in a bit of historical revision. Sidewalk Labs’ original pitch was centered almost entirely around their desire to build a city “from the internet up”; the phrase appears ten times in Sidewalk Labs’ original Project Vision. The phrase and outlook were obviously core to Sidewalk Labs’ entire identity and raison d’être: Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff penned a Medium post in 2016 titled “Reimagining cities from the internet up.”

Fast forward to 2019, and “from the internet up” is nowhere to be found in the entire MIDP. Instead, this company – which was hired for its internet prowess/connections to Google – instead claims that it “aims to create the open conditions for ongoing improvement — recognizing that the best solutions to urban challenges come not from the top down but rather from the community up” (p. 63, emphasis added).

Given that Sidewalk Labs is still a Google company whose vision still boils down to networking everything it can get its hands on, this change reads more like an attempt to couch the technical aspects of what they want to in less-threatening language. It’s on the level of all the serene illustrations they produced for this project: if you were just given these images (or their new catchphrase), you’d never guess Sidewalk Labs wanted to build a digital utopia.

It would be interesting to hear from the horse’s mouth why Sidewalk Labs has so thoroughly disowned its main contribution to the smart-city marketplace.

Sidewalk Labs justifies itself

Second, one of the most interesting parts of the Overview’s first part is Sidewalk Labs’ discussion of why it is the right company for the job (pp. 59-65). They boil it down to three reasons:

  1. Sidewalk Labs has access to Google money, which gives it a longer period for its projects to become profitable.
  2. It has many bright and experienced people working for it.
  3. Google (note: not Sidewalk Labs) has “an uncommon ability to catalyze economic development” (p. 65).

Playing devil’s advocate, I’d wonder:

  1. Sidewalk Labs can’t lose money forever, and its de facto parent company, Google, has a reputation for cutting bait on major infrastructure (Google Fibre) and public-interest (I.P. Google Reader) projects that don’t fit with its corporate (money-making) vision. What is their profitability time horizon?
  2. The company itself doesn’t have a track record. Richard Florida may vouch personally for Dan Doctoroff “and key members of his team” but what happens if he or another key person leaves over the next 10-15 years?
  3. Sidewalk Labs argues that its catalyzing of an economic cluster “is anchored by the relocation of Google’s Canadian headquarters to the eastern waterfront as part of a new innovation campus.” How much of the anticipated economic effects from this project would be driven by Google, and how much by Sidewalk Labs? I hope these numbers will be provided in a later volume.

Part 3: Launching the Sidewalk Toronto Project and a Robust Public Engagement (pp. 66-83)

This section provides a very high-level overview of Sidewalk Labs’ consultation process, which I covered briefly in a previous post.  It highlights the following engagements (pp. 67-68):

  • “dozens of community meetings and programs”
  • “a series of large-scale roundtable meetings”
  • Advisory Working Groups (p. 71; no names listed)
  • “a series of public talks”
  • “Sidewalk Toronto Residents Reference Panel, a group of 36 residents from every corner of the city and diverse back- grounds. Across six Saturday sessions, spread over nine months and dozens of hours, the panelists received an in-depth look at many aspects of the Sidewalk Toronto project and provided a detailed set of recommendations, helping to shape the plan in the best interests of all Torontonians” (see below)
  • “Sidewalk Toronto Fellows Program,” which I’ve discussed previously, along with why their inclusion doesn’t pass the true-consultation smell test
  • a YMCA kids camp, which, c’mon
  • Six topic-specific advisory boards “filled with local experts”
  • “hundreds of one-on-one or small group meetings”
  • Displaying urban innovations at Sidewalk Labs’ 307 space in Summer 2018
  • Outreach to under-represented groups, including a design workshop for members of the Indigenous community, and travelling “to middle schools to ask children and youth for their ideas”

The report also mentions Waterfront Toronto-run consultations on digital-focused elements and “design jams” (pp. 68-69).

Missing: a comprehensive list of meeting dates, times and/or attendees.

Regarding the Sidewalk Toronto Residents Reference Panel whose members aren’t identified in the report, In an article for Now magazine, Cybele Sack, who participated in the Reference Panel, raises serious doubts about its representativeness, including Sidewalk Labs’ aversion to discuss data governance in favour of “safer examples to frame the conversation. Let’s talk about potholes, they said, or how to make sure an older woman can have extra time to cross the street. Who would object to that?”

Parts of the process, she writes, “felt like a sales job – we were instructed not to choose whether we wanted this project or not, but to provide specific feedback on elements of it.”

Conspicuously absent from this section, from the subsidiary of the company that runs Google Groups and that wants to build a city “from the internet up,” was any mention of online engagement beyond livestreaming (which gets a few mentions only in the consultation timeline, p. 70) and posting documents online. No innovative online community forums, no hangouts. The Brazilian government showed more digital creativity and willingness to engage in an actual conversation with people in its internet-governance consultations than did Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto.

Again, the picture that emerges is of a company that is less interested in building a city “from the community up” and more one that wants the illusion of consultation while maintaining maximum control over the narrative and outcomes.

This section also highlights seven themes that emerged from these consultations, themes that tend to reflect issues that Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs had previously identified in the Project Vision (Sidewalk Labs) and the Plan Development Agreement (the Pillars; Schedule B) documents. It says how it will achieve these goals, invoking a mix of actual policies, aspirational technology, new institutions, and claims about what their proposals will accomplish. Most of this is covered in greater detail in later sections, so I’ll leave it until then.

Sidewalk Labs’ Intentions for the Sidewalk Toronto Project (pp. 84-85, not listed in Table of Contents)

Sidewalk Labs lists its (heavily qualified) “won’ts”

In which Sidewalk Labs foreswears selling or using for advertising “personal information,” which I include in quotes because one of the things Sidewalk Labs is up to in these documents is redefining different types of data according to its own idiosyncratic definitions. We’ll get to that in a later post.

Even better, they qualify this seemingly unambiguous guarantee two sentences later. A guarantee not to sell personal information becomes a commitment “to not disclose personal information to third parties, including other Alphabet companies without explicit consent” (emphasis added). No word here on how “explicit consent” will be defined, and Dr. Natasha Tusikov, who is finishing up Chapter 5 of Volume 2, informs me they don’t deal with that issue there, either. A timber skyscraper-sized loophole, as it were.

Claim 2 is that “Sidewalk Labs is not motivated by a desire to export Canadian talent or intellectual output to the United States,” stating that it

is not an internet company that can exist anywhere. An important part of its business model involves going “all in” on physical places. This proposal seeks to make Toronto such a place. Moreover, Sidewalk Labs has committed to share profits with the public sector of certain technologies first deployed in Toronto (p. 84).

This claim strains credulity. If Sidewalk Labs is interested in developing intellectual property, to the extent that it controls this intellectual property it will be exporting developed-in-Canada IP to the United States. This has nothing to do with being an “internet company” or not.

This is also another example of Sidewalk Labs’ too-cute habit of shifting between claims that it is or isn’t a Google company depending on the audience and its immediate strategic needs. As I noted in my previous post, most of the economic benefits Sidewalk Labs is promising Toronto will be the result of Google’s presence at the heart of its new tech hub. Google works in part by acquiring IP and companies because that’s what tech companies do. There is absolutely no reason to think they will act differently in Toronto.

Also, if an American company controls the IP developed by Canadian companies and talent, there’s no reason to “export Canadian talent … to the United States,” so this promise doesn’t seem to be worth much.

Claim 3 is that they are not interested in developing “the wider Port Lands” (p. 84). This claim might be technically correct (which is the best type of correct), but it obscures the fact that even their play for Villiers Island goes beyond the original RFP and that their governance proposals would see them exerting significant influence over this.

Having foresworn so much, all it wants is “to create places that apply 21st-century concepts in design and technology to achieve improvements in nearly every dimension important to quality of urban life, from creating jobs and reducing the cost of living to increasing mobility and advancing sustainability” (p. 85). And to “earn a reasonable return on its investment” (p. 85), whatever that may be.

Submitting the Master Innovation and Development Plan (p. 86, not listed in the table of contents)

In which we are reminded that once Waterfront Toronto finishes its consultations, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs will then negotiate a final(ish) version of this document, which would then require other levels of governments and agencies to agree to change their rules to fit what Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs are proposing.

It is also a reminder that Sidewalk Labs is asking for things that Waterfront Toronto cannot deliver on its own and which Waterfront Toronto cannot compel from other levels of government. Some of these things, such as redirected transit funding, could cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Others will involve creating new bureaucracies and special rules (read: special treatment) for a tiny, corporate-directed sliver of land. No prizes for guessing who would be responsible for funding these positions: call them user fees or taxes, but residents (including many who won’t even be living in Quayside) will be stuck with the bill one way or another.

Then again, this fits with Waterfront Toronto’s original strategy as I read it back in the Auditor General’s report and original Request for Proposals: use its direct control of Quayside to kickstart Waterfront Toronto-driven development in the rest of the Eastern Waterfront. The only difference is, under the MIDP as currently written, Sidewalk Labs, not Waterfront Toronto, would be in the driver’s seat.

That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, on to Section B: The Plans.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Entry 10: The MIDP Overview I: Format and first impressions

Posted on July 25, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and relevant documents available here

And so we get … finally … to the main event. As you’d expect from an overview of a three-volume report, there’s a lot to cover in the Overview, far more than would  comfortably fit in a single post. It’s also, as I note below, heavily back-loaded, so it also doesn’t make sense just to do a straightforward, page-by-page analysis.

As a result, I’m going to highlight a few key points of interest over several posts. First, some comments on the Overview’s overall format and some general impressions.

Not designed to be easily read

As a former parliamentary committee staffer, I’ve written my fair share of reports. As an academic I’ve read even more. Good reports lead with a summary of purpose and findings. If they’re built on consultations, they include an appendix listing every relevant meeting. The report is divided into discrete sections, with recommendations (if needed) serving as their logical endpoint. Recommendations are summarized in a separate section.

These kinds of reports are, in short, designed to be read and understood.

Based on my experience, I’m fairly confident that the Overview of Sidewalk Labs’ long-awaited, and long-delayed, Master Innovation and Development Plan, was not designed to be read, but to overwhelm.

200 pages of preamble, 39 pages of substance

The Overview starts off with a 201-page public-relations preamble designed to bedazzle with the possibilities of a Smart City; in other words, much of it is a recapitulation of Sidewalk Labs’ original Project Vision with a few substantive additions sprinkled throughout.

These two hundred pages are followed by 39 pages in which they get down to business. At the end of the day, Sidewalk Labs’ ask is extensive but pretty straightforward, and they do an able job of summarizing it in those 39 pages at the end of the Overview. Anyone wanting to understand exactly what Sidewalk Labs is proposing – and, more importantly, what it is asking for – should start on page 203, and maybe dip into the previous pages as needed.

Not designed for easy analysis

On format, this is a 254-page document released online initially on June 24 only as a 127-page pdf, which meant lots of zooming and moving the document around the screen. On July 15, Sidewalk Labs released a “printer friendly version” of the whole report, although only in separate files. So, those of you who waited before diving in, congratulations – your reading experience will be better than mine was.

There are no hyperlinks within the document, meaning that endnotes (always more difficult to consult that footnotes) and references to other places in the document or the report rely on written prompts. As a result, this document, from a subsidiary of the world’s leading online company, is less technologically advanced than your typical Lonely Planet guidebook.

There is no executive summary. There’s not even an overarching table of contents for the entire report (in one place, I mean), let alone an index. There is no master pdf, to allow for easy comparisons between chapters. (I may not have access to Google’s resources, but I’ve put one together. It comes out to 1,496 pages, but there are a lot of blank and photo-only pages in there. Substantively, it’s much shorter, but you have to wade through the sales rhetoric to find the substance. If I have time later, I’ll see how long it actually is once its many superfluous design elements are eliminated.)

That’s not to say there aren’t some telling points in those first two hundred pages, but you have to wade through a lot of vapourware to find them.

In reviewing this document, I’m going to try to ignore the platitudes and starry-eyed “coulds” (this aspirational term appearing 101 times in the Overview) to focus on exactly what Sidewalk Labs is proposing.

First impressions

  • Although the Plan Development Agreement, as I noted in Entry 9, stated that the MIDP was supposed to be a jointly undertaken exercise, the MIDP is branded solely as a Sidewalk Labs’ production.
  • In the Foreword, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff claims that the MIDP “reflects 18 months of input from more than 21,000 Torontonians; all levels of government; dozens of meetings with local experts, non-profits, and community stakeholders; and the research, engineering, and design work of more than 100 local firms” (p. 13). No list of meetings is provided. No complete breakdown of participants by activity is provided. Nor, for example, are we provided with the names of Sidewalk Labs’ Resident Reference Panelists. All we get, in Part 2 of the project Background (pp. 54-65), is a high-level overview of aggregate numbers.
  • Sidewalk Labs seems to have deviated very little from its original Project Vision or from the priorities laid out in the Plan Development Agreement, finding that the public sentiment is largely in accord with its vision.
  • The most significant change to its plans, other than its explicitly Quayside-plus focus, seems to be a commitment not to monetize Quayside (etc.) data or provide it to Google “without explicit consent,” a timber skyscraper-sized loophole. However, it is also demanding to be paid for this qualified act of generosity, or what it refers to as making “a number of constraining unilateral commitments with regard to the commercialization of data.” It has, we are informed, “structured the business model, in response to feedback from a range of stakeholders, in ways that limit its opportunity for upside elsewhere – by forgoing revenue streams that might be less directly connected to the public interest or sought by more conventional companies.” As a result, it argues that it should be compensated with supplemental performance payments (p. 238).
  • While the MIDP Overview is much more direct in everything from its plan for remuneration (also: Sidewalk Labs finally reveals how it plans to make money from Quayside!) to exactly how much land they want to develop (tl;dr: Quayside isn’t enough for us to stay interested), it still overemphasizes, via those first 200 pages, all the cool things they “could” develop.
  • Sidewalk Labs is proposing a best-case scenario that almost certainly won’t come to pass. Some of this tech is not going to work out because that’s the nature of innovation. That’s why it would be a mistake to base one’s analysis of their proposal on what their proposed technologies (most of which don’t yet exist) could do, and not on the governance aspects of this proposal, and on Sidewalk Labs’ suitability as either a partner or co-regulator. At the very least, Sidewalk Labs should cost alternative scenarios in the other volumes; if they don’t, an independent body needs to do this.
  • Along those lines, the claimed benefits for this project assume that everything works perfectly. What I want to know: To what extent will Sidewalk Labs’ assumed economic, social and environmental gains be compromised if, for example:
    • Timber skyscrapers don’t work or aren’t approved?
    • automated cars don’t work out?
    • the City balks at prioritizing waterfront light rail?
  • Absent cost-benefit calculations: The Overview does not provide a cost-benefit analysis of many of the technologies they are proposing. For example, delivery trucks may be a real bummer, but what is the relative cost compared to Sidewalk Labs’ proposed underground tunnels, or even to, say, smaller delivery trucks of the kind I saw everywhere during my year in Germany? The absence of this systematic analysis necessarily leads to an overstatement of the touted technological benefits of its proposal.
  • IDEA District or bust: Sidewalk Labs won’t play ball if this project isn’t expanded beyond Quayside, and most of its touted benefits are based on them getting everything they’re asking for.
  • Sidewalk Labs really, really, really wants light rail to be extended to the Eastern Waterfront, and they’re willing to, um, loan the city money to do it.
  • Truly, the era of smaller government is over: Sidewalk Labs sure is proposing a lot of new government oversight mechanisms (read: bureaucracies), including the restructuring or replacement of Waterfront Toronto. I believe the kids call that a “power move.”
  • Sidewalk Labs underplays the role of standards-setting in this document. There’s a lot of power and influence to be had in creating, say, the standards for automated shipping and delivery containers and systems that will only work efficiently if deployed on a scale much larger than the Eastern Waterfront.
  • Huge scope expansion: The Plan Development Agreement and RFP were pretty clear that it would be Quayside first, and then, possibly (probably?) other parts of the Eastern Waterfront. Sidewalk Labs seems to be treating their Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration (or IDEA, because of course it is) District as a single package. Basically, they’re reframing the deal by renaming the land to fit their preferred geography. None of Waterfront Toronto’s previous related documents, as far as I know, have referred to “The River District.”
  • Sidewalk Labs’ pretty obvious effort to reframe the scope of the project to cover far more than Quayside has created a situation in which it is asking (or demanding) more than Waterfront Toronto can provide on its own.
    • However, one can discern a strategy at play. As the Auditor General of Ontario remarks, Waterfront Toronto’s original goal with the RFP, seems to have been to leverage its control over Quayside into more-direct control over the entire Eastern Waterfront (in order to develop it).
    • Sidewalk Labs’ plan fulfills this objective, although maybe not in a way that Waterfront Toronto foresaw.
    • This type of takeover was always going to be bureaucratically messy, but my reading of the original RFP leads me to think that Waterfront Toronto intended to have its private-sector partner help to ease the way for Waterfront Toronto’s consolidation of control over the Eastern Waterfront — again, in order to develop it, which is its mission, after all. In this sense, Sidewalk Labs’ proposal might be seen as a huge win for Waterfront Toronto.
    • The MIDP may or may not be a good plan. While this distinction is hugely consequential for residents, from Waterfront Toronto’s perspective, the fact that this plan exists may be all that matters to them.
  • A centrally planned community: “The innovations are designed to work together to create diverse, thriving, mixed-income neighbourhoods” (p. 37). If these innovations are designed to work together, what happens if one or more innovations (e.g., self-driving cars) turn out to be infeasible?

That’s enough for now. More tomorrow.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Entry 9: Open Letter from Waterfront Toronto Board Chair, Stephen Diamond regarding Quayside

Posted on July 24, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and relevant documents available here

Well, it looks like I got my first payoff to doing the background reading only two paragraphs into the Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) cover letter.

 I’m speaking of the June 24, 2019, “Open Letter from Waterfront Toronto Board Chair, Stephen Diamond regarding Quayside.” In it, Diamond states that:

It is important to know that Waterfront Toronto did not co-create the MIDP. While Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs did work together earlier in the process to do research, generate ideas, and consult the public, the roles of the two organizations then separated, allowing Waterfront Toronto to focus on creating a robust framework for review and evaluation of the MIDP. Sidewalk Labs’ responsibility is to prepare and submit the MIDP. (emphasis added)

Let’s turn to Schedule F, “Collaboration Principles,” of the July 2018 Plan Development Agreement, shall we?

Article 1.01, “Day-to-Day Collaboration,” states (emphasis added):

a) Planning and development of the MIDP and the Principal Implementation Agreements will be managed through a jointly formed committee (the “Project Management Committee”) consisting of one senior project management representative of each of Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs.

b) Under the day-to-day direction of the Project Management Committee, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs will:

i. Overseeing digital governance elements of the MIDP, including through the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel in accordance with the Digital Governance Framework Principles;

ii. Collaborating with Sidewalk Labs with respect to the achievement of the vision and goals of the Parties as summarized in Section 1.02 of Schedule B hereto, including with respect to sustainability, buildings, community and city services, public realm, mobility and digital platform; …

iii. work as an integrated team, with the key employees of Waterfront Toronto engaged in the creation of the MIDP (the “WT Team”) working together with the key employees of Sidewalk Labs working on the creation of the MIDP (the “Sidewalk Team”);

iv. work to capitalize on their respective skills and will agree on the members of the WT Team and Sidewalk Team;

v. establish and manage working groups and “Pillars” as set out in the MIDP Scope;

vi. ensure that each major functional working group will include at least one representative or their approved designate from each organization;

vii. develop an open approach to collaborative working, with the Parties seeking to share and discuss work with sufficient opportunity for receiving and incorporating feedback; and

viii. develop and operate through specific work programs, milestones and reporting formats for the creation and formation of the MIDP, including performance management, will be devised in a manner acceptable to both Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs.

Then there’s Article 1.03, “Role of the Parties,” which also gives Waterfront Toronto a much larger role than the one claimed by Waterfront Toronto Chair Stephen Diamond (emphasis added):

(a) Waterfront Toronto will have the following responsibilities and roles in connection with the creation of the MIDP:

i. In accordance with the MOU, and subject to the approvals necessary for applicable Business and Implementation Plans, acting as revitalization lead in the public interest;

ii. In accordance with the MOU, preparing Business and Implementation Plans, as set out in more detail in Section 4.01(a);

iii. Working with Sidewalk Labs to develop the financial model and implementation phasing for the Project that seeks to make the Project financially viable and developing the business case for the MIDP, taking into account land value, Intellectual Property and infrastructure plans and any related standards or requirements;

iv. Overseeing digital governance elements of the MIDP, including through the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel in accordance with the Digital Governance Framework Principles;

v. Collaborating with Sidewalk Labs with respect to the achievement of the vision and goals of the Parties as summarized in Section 1.02 of Schedule B hereto, including with respect to sustainability, buildings, community and city services, public realm, mobility and digital platform; …

Too complicated, perhaps? I give you Article 1.05, Master Innovation and Development Plan – Joint Objectives (emphasis added):

(a) In furtherance of their shared goals and vision, the Parties will work together collaboratively, diligently and in good faith to jointly prepare the MIDP in accordance with the MIDP Scope, including the MIDP Targets set out in Schedule B, and all other terms of this Agreement.

In other words, the Plan Development Agreement, which was supposed to govern the, well, the Development of the Plan, seems pretty clearly to require a significant degree of close collaboration between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs. It does not (at least as far as I can see) limit Waterfront Toronto’s participation to a review and evaluation role.

The question of the extent of Waterfront Toronto’s involvement in developing the MIDP is significant and gets to the heart of the fatal conflict of interest at the heart of this proposals. Diamond’s statement, as well as the timing of Waterfront Toronto’s Note to Reader, are both designed to convey the impression of impartiality that is at odds with the Plan Development Agreement. Waterfront Toronto is trying to pass itself off as an independent evaluator. However, the Plan Development Agreement’s language and requirements seems to implicate it deeply in the creation of the very plan it wants to review.

Of course, this is exactly the type of problem you end up when the regulator effectively merges with the regulatee. The creation of the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel was a tacit admission that Waterfront Toronto lacked an in-house understanding of the fundamentals (data, digital, intellectual property, surveillance) of the smart city project they’d commissioned. Similarly, Waterfront Toronto’s attempts to claim that it is not implicated in the design of the MIRP tacitly grants the point that the original Waterfront Toronto team was flouting well-established governance principles.

In the upcoming consultations (the round that will feed into their report closing, as it happens, on July 31), Waterfront Toronto needs to clarify, at the very least and with physical evidence:

  1. The nature and degree of collaboration with Sidewalk Labs on:
  • the development of the various pillars (1.01(a)(v));
  • the development of the MIDP’s “digital governance elements” (1.01(a)(iv));
  • the development of the “financial model and implementation phasing” (which covers intellectual property) (1.01(a)(i))
  1. The operational definition of “integrated team” (Schedule F, 1.03(b)(i)) and “collaborative working” (Schedule F, 1.03(b)(v)); and the names and responsibilities of the Waterfront Toronto employees in “each major functional working group” Schedule F, 1.03(b)(iv)).
  1. How, given that the Plan Development Agreement required that the MIDP be prepared jointly and collaboratively (1.05(a)), the final plan included several major points that Diamond writes raises concerns for Waterfront Toronto.
  1. Why, how, and on whose authority, if Diamond is being accurate, the Plan Development Agreement was interpreted in such a way to separate the roles of the two organizations in a way that pretty clearly was not envisioned in the original agreement. What changed?

And then there are the big questions:

  • Why is collaboration now seen as a problem? More directly, why was it ever seen as something positive?
  • If Waterfront Toronto determined that close collaboration as required by the Plan Development Agreement was no longer working (when did that happen?), why did it not renegotiate the agreement?
  • Who can we believe in all this?

It’s not clear to me how Waterfront Toronto, based on the Plan Development Agreement, can credibly distance itself from Sidewalk Labs’ plan. Waterfront Toronto is not, and has not been from the very beginning, independent of Sidewalk Labs.

This lack of independence has been the whole point of the exercise from the very beginning. The goal was to create “a bold, first of its kind, and innovative approach to city-building to deliver transformative benefits in quality of life to a diverse set of residents, workers, and visitors in Toronto. This requires the collaboration of Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs to develop the MIDP” (Plan Development Agreement, Schedule J, 1.01(a)), emphasis added).

The failure to follow through on the (fundamentally flawed) Plan Development Agreement while not acknowledging that it was flawed in the first place is yet another indication that the problems with Quayside are embedded in the original RFP, from which the Plan Development Agreement emerged. Flawed in terms of process and substantive issues, it never should have been issued.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Bonus Entry 4: Follow the regs, not the tech

Posted on July 23, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and key available here

In making my way through Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan (first actual MIDP post arriving tomorrow! Tell your friends.), I’ve started wondering why Sidewalk Labs needs all of these changes to existing laws and new institutions that it’s asking for.

The pitch has always been that the Quayside development offers the opportunity to build a community from scratch, “from the Internet up,” as Sidewalk Labs used to say before people realized that tech companies don’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. Working from scratch would allow Sidewalk Labs (and other companies) to develop and test new tech that it could then sell to other cities.

But it’s hardly realistic to assume that urban tech – including that developed in partnership with Sidewalk Labs – would be deployed elsewhere on a blank slate. It would, one assumes, be deployed in cities with their own laws, idiosyncrasies and existing infrastructure. From this perspective, how suitable would blank-slate tech be for other cities?

Technology exists in particular social, political and regulatory milieus. Understanding this point, I think, helps us better understand what Sidewalk Labs is up to in Toronto.

Sidewalk Labs is not just (or perhaps mainly) interested in developing specific technologies, which would then have to be adapted to other cities’ particular needs, or not be adopted at all.

Rather than traditional technology, Sidewalk Labs is working to create and develop an off-the-shelf social-norms, regulatory and standards framework that aligns with the technologies and services that companies like Google would then sell to those cities that adopt its framework. They’re as much (if not more) a service provide than a tech manufacturer or software developer.

In other words, Sidewalk Labs isn’t a tech company; it’s Google’s Division of Urban Policy.

It seems to me that for Sidewalk Labs, the Toronto Smart City project is not primarily about developing technology to fit other cities needs. It’s about developing standards and norms that will redefine other cities’ norms about what they want to ensure that their perspectives coincide with those of Sidewalk Labs and Google.

It’s about getting cities to adapt to a particular technological vision of the world, rather than adapting technology to what citizens have determined they want and need, as set out in their laws and norms. It’s about the law adapting to fit a particular technology (which embodies a particular view of the world), rather than technology adapting to fit the (democratically enacted) law.

In short, if you want to understand Sidewalk Labs and its Toronto project, focus on the regulations and standards, not the tech.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Entry 8: The Plan Development Agreement’s digital governance framework; Sidewalk Labs’ Digital Governance Proposals for DSAP Consultations

Posted on July 23, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries and relevant documents available here

Last year I decided it would be fun to read Stephen King’s entire Dark Tower series for the first time.

King and Dark Tower fans know that to get the most out of the seven proper Dark Tower novels, you need to read a bunch of King’s other books, which are only quasi-related to the main series. In a particular order. Being a completionist, getting to Book II meant that I had to first read The Eyes of the Dragon (fun!), the short story “The Little Sisters of Eluria” (diverting!), and, um, The Stand. Which, as most people know, is a fantastic read, but also So. Very. Long.

In other words, it was a lot of reading just to get back to the main event. Enjoyable? Most definitely. Worthwhile in the end? Yes. But a long way to go nonetheless.

All of this to say that this is my final, throat-clearing post before I actually start reading the actual Master Innovation and Development Plan. And while these reports share only an alphabet in common with King, I hope that reading them will illuminate our final destination in much the same way that my pre-Drawing of the Three reading did the subsequent Dark Tower books.

Anyways, on to the issues at hand. In this post I’ll be covering the digital aspects of the pre-MIDP Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto output. First, a quick summary of Schedule I of the Plan Development Agreement, “Digital Governance Framework Principles.” I’ve focused on more concrete deliverables rather than fuzzy statements of intent on the assumption that the former are more easily trackable than the latter, which could be fulfilled by doing almost anything. These will give me a yardstick with which I can evaluate the final agreement.

There is a lot of wiggle room in these principles. For example, claims that they will only collect, use, retain and disclose data “necessary for the provision of the services and [the benefit of] individuals” could also be rephrased by saying that they will collect, use, retain and disclose any data needed to provide these services. As always, the devil will be in the details.

Other than that, for the moment I’ll note that they have a strong bias toward using transparency and informed consent to ensure that peoples’ data rights are protected. They also claim to favour “Meaningful … opt-out provisions.” Reconciling the ubiquitous surveillance proposed in all previous with such an opt-out would be a neat trick.

Then, I’ll highlight some important points from Sidewalk Labs’ October 2018 “Digital Governance Proposals for DSAP Consultation,” a 41-page PowerPoint presentation that stands as its most thorough (to that date) public statement on how it thought data should be governed.

Part I: The Digital Governance Framework Principles

  • They will follow the laws of the country. (um, huzzah?)
  • Identification and assess “with respect to risk to human or democratic rights” “any form of surveillance of individuals,” and will be “remedied where necessary.” (Schedule G, Article 1) (see: devil, details)
  • Identifies an individual’s “rights to access and review their data”
  • Commits to the transparent “collection, use, retention and disclosure of personal data”
  • Will only collect, use, retain and disclose data “necessary for the provision of the services and [the benefit of] individuals.” Another way of saying this, however, is that they will collect, use, retain and disclose any data needed to provide these services.
  • Will use de-identification and other technologies “to ensure privacy is protected”
  • Based on “informed consent”
  • “Meaningful … opt-out provisions”

Note: This approach places significant responsibility on the individual: The company provides all the information (transparency), and it will be up to the individual to know and understand enough about what data is, how it is collected, and how it will be used to make sound decisions.

That’s a big ask, given that even most data experts don’t fully understand these issues, and that people are being asked for consent for companies to use their data in ways that affect other people, potentially negatively. All this to say, even “informed consent” isn’t the silver bullet we often think it is.

And of course the main point here should be that these are all empty promises until they’re actually defined in a concrete proposal.

Data governance

“Clear and robust structures of accountability for the safe use of data including open protocols and rules”

“Algorithmic transparency to avoid bias or marginalization”

“Reasonable limits on use of even aggregated data” (not defined)

Explore “novel ownership structures for non-personal data”

Note: Again, these commitments mean nothing until they are actually defined. As for the “novel ownership structures,” we can jump ahead a bit and note that this is referring to “urban data,” a phrase that doesn’t exist in Canadian law or in the data scholarship or data-policy debates (and which Sidewalk Labs can define to fit its own interests), and a “data trust,” which as Dr. Natasha Tusikov notes, would not be a “trust in the legal sense.”

Innovation: Making up phrases that sound like they mean something other than what they mean!

Data sovereignty

They will follow the law of the land.

Note: While it’s nice to know they aren’t going to commit to breaking any laws, it also means that they won’t go beyond the law to actually localize Canadian data in Canada.

Network governance

Systems and platforms that are open by default (Schedule G, Article 4).

Secure data and resilient infrastructure “and solutions”

Note: Again, the details will matter.

The Digital Strategy Advisory Panel

The mandate of the Panel is to provide Waterfront Toronto with objective, expert advice to ensure that principles of ethical use of technology, accountability, transparency, protection of personal privacy, data governance and cyber security are upheld.

Its recommendations are non-binding.

Note: As I’ve noted in previous posts, the Auditor General of Ontario has noted that the (part-time) Digital Strategy Advisory Panel has had “limited” effectiveness (in the words of one of its own members).

Part II: Digital Governance for DSAP Consultations

This document reads like a public relations exercise, touting the people they’ve consulted, including, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, the former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and Privacy by Design consultant, who famously resigned as a Sidewalk Labs advisor at about this time because of concerns over privacy. (She has since softened her stance against Sidewalk Labs, embracing parts of the MIDP.)  There are no links to other reports, so it’s unclear where they came up with some of their more consequential ideas, particularly “Urban Data” and the “Civic Data Trust.” This thinness makes it difficult to evaluate on its own terms.

Profit source?

From the outset we knew that the monetization of data would not be part of our business model. (p. 4)

This comment responded to the fact that since October 2017 neither Sidewalk Labs nor Waterfront Toronto had been forthcoming about how the for-profit Sidewalk Labs would make its money on this project.

Privacy by design?

Sidewalk Labs leans heavily on “Privacy by Design” (p. 8). Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, data law expert par excellence and Digital Strategy Advisory Panel member, offers a useful critique of this proposal (spoiler: it’s much less than meets the eye).

As an added bonus, her line “The second point I tried to make in my 5 minutes at the Thursday meeting was about data governance” is telling regarding the amount of oversight the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel is able to provide. No matter how brilliant its members (and I’m a huge admirer of many of them), they’re still doing this on a part-time basis, meeting once every few weeks or months. An outside, part-time panel is no substitute for in-house experience.

  • “Independent governance is necessary to protect personal and public interests across areas of data stewardship, privacy, access, and, security—in addition to government enforcement of Canadian and Ontario privacy laws and regulations.” Everyone should be subject to the same rules (p. 10).

Let’s make up some concepts! Sidewalk Labs’ Civic Data Trust and Urban Data

From the beginning, one of the problems in evaluating Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto’s Quayside proposals is that they kept moving the goalposts. Two posts ago, I noted how Sidewalk Labs’ original $US 50 million ante was portrayed as an investment in consultations, or in the “initial planning and testing phase of the project.” In July 2018, it came out that it was also originally intended as a possible land downpayment, but then the Plan Development Agreement nixed that. It’s hard to keep up when you’re dealing with Billy Flynn-levels of creative confusion.

Here, we get two new terms that we’ve never seen before: a “Civic Data Trust,” and “urban data” (pp. 11-16).

Others, such as Dr. Tusikov, have discussed issues and concerns with these two terms, and this proposal spends some time outlining each concept, but for the purposes of preparing to examine the MIDP, the main point to keep in mind is that both of these terms are not found in Canadian law. Neither are they in common usage among data scholars. In fact, they seem to originate with Sidewalk Labs. A quick Google Scholar search reveals no examples of term “civic data trust” before 2019.  Categorizing data as “urban” and “non-urban” is likewise an innovation (it’s mentioned briefly in the Plan Development Agreement). (Sidewalk Labs defines urban data as “data collected in the physical environment” (p. 37)). In contrast, Canadian law tends to focus on personal information, not “urban data.”

What this means is that Sidewalk Labs can define these two terms any way they want. Their definitions in those documents will be consequential.

Noted: The Civic Data Trust would be responsible for obtaining some form of “community consent” (p. 38), which would seem to be a departure from the emphasis on individual consent.

Schedule I (above) of the Plan Development Agreement refers only to the need for “Meaningful, informed consent and opt-out provisions.” This part is probably linked to their idea of urban data, which would “not apply to Urban Data in most cases.” Such data would be made “freely and publicly available as a default matter and/or controlling access” (p. 38). It does make me wonder when, how and why Sidewalk Labs came up with the category of Urban Data in the first place, rather than using concepts based in the Canadian law that both Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto profess to hold so dear.

Responsible Data Impact Assessment

This document also proposes a Responsible Data Impact Assessment, to be done “at the design phase, prior to data collection or use” (pp. 17-21).

Again, how this is treated in the MIDP will be important. For now, the key point is that this is yet another example of Sidewalk Labs setting up the standards by which it will evaluate projects in which it will likely have an intimate interest. As with much of these proposals, including those under the “Governance Case Studies” section (pp. 22-25), it’s not the idea of a risk assessment that’s problematic; it’s the way in which it will be carried out. We need details, which hopefully will be provided in the MIDP.

Not a smart city, or an adaptable city, but one with different priorities

The “Open Digital Infrastructure and Services” commits to open architecture and standards rather than “a centralized, monolithic platform” (p. 30), that will be open to “a wide range of players” (p. 29).

Parts of the “Open Digital Infrastructure and Services” repeat the vapourware promises of Sidewalk Labs’ Project Vision document (e.g., the list on p. 27; “Enabling innovation by a wide range of players,” p. 29), but one thing that stood out to me was its mission-statement recap section, also on p. 27:

From the start of this project, we imagined a set of new experiences that could be possible in a new type of city. Streets that prioritized safety, pedestrians, and cyclists … . Buildings with a far more diverse and vibrant mix of uses … . Significantly reduced carbon emissions.

This statement highlights the fact that the Quayside project is as much about setting priorities as it is about introducing cool tech and sensors. Sidewalk Labs isn’t just selling a surveillance-driven datafied city. The above statement outlines the priorities Sidewalk Labs has for the city. They are a statement about how the city should be governed. And while they look pretty inoffensive, they amount in this context to governance by stealth, an attempt to change the city’s political priorities via infrastructure plans.

While it seems like we’re all discussing, say, algorithm-driven traffic flows, we’re actually discussing what rules should govern our cities, and who should be setting them. And the one thing that characterizes all of the Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs documents we’ve looked at up until now is that it assumes a particular set of priorities. This assumption effectively takes the discussion of whether these priorities are the right ones s off the table.

This gets to the problem with the above statement: it assumes that the desired outcomes are going to be uncontroversial and can therefore be left to the experts. It assumes that they are beyond politics.

One of the most important lessons I learned in my six years working for various federal parliamentary committees is that people of good faith (and almost all of the politicians I worked with fit this description) can have dramatically different visions about what policies Canada should adopt, and that what is uncontroversial to one person will be hugely troubling to another. That’s why we have politics and Parliaments: to work these things out in an open, democratic manner.

I certainly thought that a lot of what I heard from parliamentarians was wrong, but I never doubted that these perspectives came almost always from a desire to make Canada a better place. And even when I heard something that I thought was wrong, I tried to keep in mind that maybe (just maybe!) they knew more than I did, and that that I might be the one who’s wrong. That’s politics; that’s policymaking.

The last thing any city should do is to assume that everyone shares the same prioritization of means and objectives. These are political discussions and should be treated as such. Instead, Sidewalk Labs is proposing its own set of priorities, sidestepping the debate over whether or how these priorities should be pursued.

Data Localization: No, thank you.

 Sidewalk Labs isn’t going to do that (p. 35).

Quayside as a data source for Google?

They give a flat “no.” (p. 38)

We’ll see. I’ve read ahead and (spoiler) they leave themselves a lot of wiggle room. Sidewalk Labs

commits to not disclose personal information to third parties, including other Alphabet companies, without explicit consent (MIDP Overview, p. 84, emphasis added).

Not sharing without explicit consent is way different from a hard “no.” And as suggested by our above discussion about urban data and civic data trusts, to say nothing of their way of playing with the meaning of words like “no,” you can be pretty sure that regular people and Sidewalk Labs have very different ideas about what “explicit consent” actually means.

Sidewalk Labs’ role and general governance

  • Sidewalk Labs: will be the provider of “some critical infrastructure and core services,” with “other players provid[ing] the lion’s share of technology.
  • Governments: they enforce privacy laws
  • Data Trust: it will oversee the collection and use data, possibly with some government involvement.

That’s it for now. One more sleep until the MIDP!

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