Barcelona’s chief digital officer Francesca Bria talks smarter cities

‘There is a new deal on data,’ says Francesca Bria, the woman charged with turning Barcelona into a truly smart city — a city that harnesses the power of technology and puts it to use solving the problems of its citizens. ‘We believe that data is a public infrastructure — like water, like roads, like the air we breathe — and it should be treated as such. It belongs to the citizens of Barcelona.’

This isn’t just rhetoric: Bria is taking data from big companies, and handing it back to the people who generated it. Vodafone, the provider of the city’s telecoms services, is now contractually obliged to give back the data it collects from the public, which will be published anonymously on the council’s open data portal. It wasn’t exactly easy to negotiate: ‘They resisted for over a year,’ Bria says.

For anyone who has ever considered swapping Google search for DuckDuckGo, or sighed when yet another mega corporation wins yet another massive contract with the government, or wondered how exactly the local council decides what it does with tax money, Bria is something of a hero. Alongside her day job, she leads DECODE, an EU project piloting new technologies that give people more control over their data. And she’s bullish about the role Europe can play in harnessing tech for society — and not just shareholders; rather than follow the market-driven US approach, or the state-driven Chinese model, she thinks ‘Europe can have a different way’.

Siim Sikkut, the Estonian government’s chief information officer, says that Bria had made Barcelona one of the front runners in the race to develop smart cities. In the ‘small club’ of CIOs, they were watching her progress very closely. ‘People do not just follow those who talk about it but those who do it. That is where Francesca is,’ he says.

‘People do not just follow those who talk about it but those who do it. That is where Francesca is.’ — Siim Sikkut

In the two years since she moved from London, where she was working for the innovation foundation Nesta, to Barcelona, she’s been cracking on with the task set her by the then-newly elected mayor Ada Colau: ‘I want to see technology and data that serves the people.’ Bria has pioneered a digital platform, Decidim, to involve citizens at all stages of local government decision-making, from proposing ideas to budgeting. She’s also ripped up the old, easily corrupted procurement procedures for city services and set out ethical standards for all government contractors. And, via the same online platform begun to experiment with a ‘data commons’, whereby citizens can choose whether to share their data, with whom and for what purposes.

‘It’s a little bit like the Creative Commons for content,’ she explains, referring to the licensing system by which creators share their work for free with others, in a rights-preserving manner. ‘But we’re trying to do that for data.’

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Citizens will be able to choose what kind of (encrypted, privacy-enhancing) data they want to share, with whom, and on what terms, via the city hall’s platform; for example, sharing information about the air quality on their street with the city hall — but not their insurance company; or sharing personal information with a local community organisation, but not the city hall.

Bria hopes this transparency will help people push back against companies which manipulate information they gather about them (think, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica), and start a broader debate about who should profit from people’s data.