How do you generate innovation value from ever greater volumes of Internet of Things (IoT) data while simultaneously developing the guardrails - governance, broader policies, technical standards, ethics - that will ultimately lead to scale-up and impact? 

This question was at the centre of an intensive series of workshops at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), held last week in San Francisco.  For Smart Dubai Data, who attended and contributed, answering it is instrumental in continuing our journey from public sector data governor, to private sector data convenor, and on further into city data market maker.  

Involving public sector and private sector partners from around the world (Denmark, Brazil, Japan, China, India, UAE and the U.S), the workshops were organised around two important themes:

1. Showing through use cases how governments, industry, startups, academia and civic society can use IoT (especially high precision location) technologies to address environmental and climate-related challenges.
2. To enable this, exploring the most advanced approaches to data management and sharing in cities.

Smart Dubai’s interest in both is clear.  We chair the SDG11 Global Council.  Its job it is to understand how technology can help create sustainable outcomes for cities, in which environment and climate are obvious and vital issues to address.  Furthermore, our ‘Emerging Technologies Economic Impact’ report identifies nine focus technologies for future success.  Key amongst these are artificial intelligence, autonomous transport, and IoT.  All three promise immense value, and to transform our relationship with data and technology, and the way that we live in urban settings. 

They are joined by a fourth (distributed ledger) technology in a recent white paper which, importantly, sets out how their ‘convergence’ demands a more decentralised internet and a move away from the current siloed approach to data management. 

In the C4IR workshop, Smart Dubai Data set out our ambitious plans to launch a sandbox for decentralised data exchange.  This experiment has the potential to open up significant flows of value, offering security and control where it is needed, and showing the promise of functioning, scalable data markets.

At the centre of our presentation to international colleagues were the four themes around which our work is organised, and which add up to an ecosystem-wide approach:     

1. Technology - in many ways the easiest of the four, we will trial a decentralised architecture and a platform that allows for data discovery, transfer and trust arrangements (e.g. smart contracts and payments).We will also develop the technical and business protocols for guaranteed supply of high quality data into an exchange environment.
2. Community and Content - use cases (often to be found in IoT related areas) that make the case for decentralised data exchange are vital.Intense, multi-stakeholder community engagement is how we will develop this content.
3. Market and Business Model – this theme represents a chance to build on the complex and valuable work Smart Dubai has led globally by co-chairing the Data Economy, commercialization, and monetization working group within the ITU Focus Group on Data Processing and Management .Here we will also explore self-sustaining approaches to the business model for the platform as a whole.
4. Governance – This track has to draw together a number of pieces of work.Our broad private sector engagement has set the scene for the development of specific data sharing agreements with private sector partners and the trialing of data trust models. We need to transfer our experience from these varied exercises with a view to deepening the trust between a variety of actors, whilst accounting for their different motivations for (not) exchanging data.

We were really excited to be at the C4IR.  It was a privilege to present our work to them and to explore how in broader terms decentralised data exchange can accelerate the impact of IoT data, and deliver the subsequent value-based market forming activities around it.  We believe that what we are doing in Dubai is world leading, and we look forward to contributing to further work as the team develops policy protocols and new standards for data sharing platforms. 

In this piece, we have emphasised the importance of community in our own decentralised data sandbox.  More news on formal ecosystem engagement will come soon.  That said, we want to hear now from those - either here in Dubai or from further afield -  who want to help us build use cases and who have an interest in the exciting and emerging field of city data markets.  If you are interested, please contact me at andrew.collinge@smartdubai.ae