Show Me the Policies: The Access to Information Problem Whether for those looking to advance and improve, critique and prevent, or understand and explain platform data sharing policy in cities, a key problem for the field has been a lack of access to user friendly resources for finding and comparing the policy documents themselves, including simply accessing, searching and downloading the text across a variety of local jurisdictions and sharing economy sectors. This lack of access to comprehensive, searchable, and downloadable policy information for local government platform data mandates is a barrier for multiple stakeholder groups: •
Local Government Officials: City and other local government officials can’t easily see what their peers are doing and learn from them to improve the way data sharing policy is written and implemented.
•
Advocates and Community Groups: Advocates and community groups are hard strapped to track and review policy and provide feedback, critique provisions, or hold officials accountable to policy commitments.
•
Researchers and Journalists: Researchers and journalists rely on secondhand accounts to understand, evaluate, and explain municipal data sharing policies, often painting policies in broad strokes without being able to dig in to the specific language of the texts.
•
Platform Companies: platform companies themselves don’t always know what jurisdictions require what data.
In our preliminary conversations as we began our work, the need seemed most urgent from local government officials who feel increasing pressure to design new policies and programs to enable public-private data sharing.
42
Towards Urban Data Commons? On the Origins and Significance of Platform Data Sharing Mandates
