Francesca Bria on Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty

The P2P Foundation is serializing video highlights from last year’s Platform Cooperativism conference. Click here to see all conference videos.

Cities and Technological Sovereignty 3 – Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty: Winning Back Technology for the People

(14 mins) Francesca Bria – While the platform economy has a clear potential to generate economic impact, there are several important issues that need to be resolved: first and foremost, around ownership, control and management of personal data. One key reason cities and municipalities have so far failed to foster local data-intensive platforms that can compete with Uber and Airbnb is missing access to raw data. Data has become a key part of the urban infrastructure. It helps make better, quicker, and more empirically sound decisions; it promotes socio-economic development and innovation; it improves public services and empowers citizens. But who should own it? Many technology firms aspire to turn data into a new asset class, the key ingredient of what has been called “surveillance capitalism.” But is this the only option? Can cities embrace a different model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? How can cities help ensure that such data is not locked in corporate silos, but is rather turned into a public good?

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