Barcelona City Council Digital Plan

Barcelona

City Council

Digital Plan

May 2018 Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure

concerning ethical

management and

accountable data:

Barcelona Data

Commons

The Open Digitisation Programme from Barcelona City

Council’s Office for Technology and Digital Innovation

This Guide was prepared by a team led by Francesca Bria, the

Commissioner for Technology and Digital Innovation. Its mem-

bers included Francesca Bria, Màrius Boada, Malcolm Bain,

and Pau Balcells.

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

INDEX

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ..................................................................

1. INTRODUCTION AND JUSTIFICATION ..........................................

2. OBJECTIVES OF THE MEASURE ...................................................

2.1. Goals .......................................................................................................

2.2. Barcelona Data Commons ...........................................................................

2.3. The Municipal Data Ofﬁce

and the Chief Data Ofﬁcer (CDO) .......................................................................

3. CONTEXT ...............................................................................

3.1. Current situation .......................................................................................

3.2. Data-strategy motivations ...........................................................................

4. ESSENTIAL VALUES OF THE PROGRAMME.......................................

4.1. Essential values .........................................................................................

4.2. Data sovereignty ........................................................................................

4.3. The ethical use of data ...............................................................................

5. SCOPE OF APPLICATION ...........................................................

5.1. Organisations and systems ...........................................................................

5.2. Data .........................................................................................................

5.3. Environment and ecosystem ........................................................................

6. GOVERNANCE OF MUNICIPAL DATA:

THE MUNICIPAL DATA OFFICE ........................................................

6.1. Organisation: the Municipal Data Ofﬁce ........................................................

6.2. Supervision: Commission for Technology

and Digital Innovation (CTID) ..............................................................................

7. STRATEGIC AREAS ....................................................................

7.1. The deployment of the new data governance ..................................................

7.2. Ethical and responsible data management ......................................................

7.3. City Data Infrastructure ..............................................................................

7.4. Internal innovation based on data:

analysis and data-based projects ........................................................................

7.5. Barcelona Data Exchange:

external data enhancing ...................................................................................

8. EMBLEMATIC PROJECTS ............................................................

9. APPENDICES ............................................................................

9.1. Directive concerning municipal data

governance and the Municipal Data Ofﬁce ...........................................................

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

In September 2016, Barcelona City Council

embarked on a major digital transformation

process announcing that public services must

be provided through digital channels from the

outset, following new guidelines based on ci-

tizen guidance and the use of open standards

and open software and in accordance with an

ethical data strategy that focuses on privacy,

transparency and digital rights.

The decision taken by the municipal govern-

ment is based on the “Barcelona Digital City”

Plan, approved in the “Transition Towards

Technological Sovereignty” government mea-

sure in October 2016 and the new Spanish Act

39/2015 on Common Administrative Procedu-

res for Public Authorities. This Act states that,

by 2020, digital channels must take priority in

the provision of public services in Spain. The

Barcelona Digital City Plan establishes a radical

improvement in digital public services as one

of its main objectives, with the aim of provi-

ding services to city residents on a 24/7 basis

that are of higher quality and better adapted

to their needs.

This document establishes the defining plan for

the programme and all the actions and tasks

that make up the responsible and ethical use

of data strategy, developed as part of Barce-

lona’s Digital Transformation Plan (DTP). This

plan is led by Barcelona City Council’s Commis-

sion for Digital Technology and Innovation. The

document describes the programme’s scope,

its relation to the DTP, its objectives and the

implementation schedule for each task and

action. The programme for open digitalisation

is completed by free software and agile ser-

vice development, published in a government

measure in October 2017.

Executive

Summary

Through this government measure and the

action plan it contains, Barcelona becomes

the first Spanish city to develop a Municipal

Data Office, making it possible to structure

informed public policies using information pro-

vided by data, the proper treatment of that

data and its resulting analysis. The responsible

and ethical use of data is a key element of

Barcelona City Council’s Digital Transforma-

tion Plan, especially the Open Data and Data

Commons strategies, data-driven projects and

interoperability based on open-data formats.

This government measure provides a global

vision of the City Council’s data-management

plan and the proposed changes for putting

it into practice. It explains the governance

mechanisms for this data management, the

fundamental values for ensuring data sove-

reignty, privacy and security, and also presents

the actions geared towards internal and exter-

nal data enhancement, a practical approach

based on establishing specific projects with

a roadmap, a budget and a schedule.

Ethical and responsible data management,

together with the use of free software tools

indicated in the previous government measure

of October 2017, ensure universal access and

improved transparency. We are also laying the

foundations for new initiatives based on making

the best use of data, which will strengthen the

administration and make it more independent.

The Code of Practice provided in an appen-

dix to the government measure of October

2017 establishes the more technological di-

rectives aimed at putting the lines of action

into practice, along with the measure’s re-

quirements for the responsible use of data.

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

This measure is accompanied by an directive

concerning the Municipal Data Office, which

defines the governance model and the roles

and responsibilities of the people in charge

of planning and supervising data management

in the City Council.

The agile transformation programme, which

contains the responsible and ethical use of data

strategy, is continually evolving. Therefore, the

general provisions of this government measure

will be updated and put into practice as the

programme is applied. Our aim is to continue

moving forward and do much more than this

government measure proposes, given that it

only establishes the principles of a process of

continual improvement.

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Information and information technology (IT)

resources are critical features of the social,

political and economic welfare of Barcelona

residents. In regard to local administration, they

make it possible for the City Council to provide

the general public with high-quality services,

generate and disseminate knowledge and fa-

cilitate growth and improved productivity.

For the City Council, it is important to maxi-

mise the quality and security of its data and

information systems; to develop and apply

the coherent management of information re-

sources and management policies that aim to

keep the general public constantly informed,

protect their rights as subjects, improve the

productivity, efficiency, effectiveness and

public return of its projects and to promo-

te responsible innovation. Furthermore, as

technology evolves, it is important for public

institutions to manage their information sys-

tems in such a way as to identify and minimise

the security and privacy risks associated with

the new capacities of those systems.

Information management technologies also

provide significant opportunities for local

government. The far-reaching integration of

IT with local responsibilities and their proces-

ses, together with the digital economy and

combined with the increasing interconnec-

tion between technology and public services,

has changed the way we share information

and the use and perception of technolo-

gies, and has definitively transformed the

general public’s expectations and the way

they use technology. In order to respond

to the general public’s expectations and to

facilitate innovation, Barcelona City Council

must continue to transform, with the aim

of assimilating and adopting the digital re-

Introduction

and justiﬁcation

volution, while also maintaining its human

team, and producing world class, safe digital

services from the unequivocal perspective

of public service.

The responsible and ethical use of data

strategy is part of Barcelona’s Digital Trans-

formation Plan (DTP), which establishes the

roadmap designed by the Commission for

Digital Technology and Innovation and its

policies for modernising data management

and use within Barcelona City Council. The

strategy is being put into practice in the

shape of a plan that involves various pro-

grammes, which are described here. Although

the programme was specifically conceived

as a conceptual framework for achieving a

cultural change in terms of the public per-

ception of data, it basically covers all the

aspects of the DTP that concern data, and in

particular the open-data and data-commons

strategies, data-driven projects, with the

aim of providing better urban services and

interoperability based on metadata schemes

and open-data formats, permanent access

and data use and reuse, with the minimum

possible legal, economic and technological

barriers within current legislation.

Information technology is at the centre of

almost everything, and the City Council and

its manager’s ofﬁces, institutes, companies,

consortiums, etc. must continue to identify

ways to apply emerging technologies, which

basically make it possible to improve general

governance and to provide more and better

services, while also reducing costs. The pro-

vision of high quality services means that the

City Council has to change its methods for

purchasing, building and providing IT.

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Objectives

of the measure

This measure establishes the general policy

for the governance, planning, procurement,

management, analysis, use, protection, access

and preservation, as long as necessary, and

the reuse of municipal data to add value to

municipal digital information throughout its

life cycle, as well as aspects arising from this in

terms of human resources, IT infrastructures

and resources, economic management and

support services.

The strategy of responsible data management

is deﬁned with the aim of helping to guide the

transformation of the municipal government’s

IT systems by means of the institutionalisation

of more agile approaches, which should faci-

litate a speedy adoption of the technological

changes in such a way that security, techno-

logical sovereignty, privacy and information

and data management are reinforced, along

with all municipal services and programmes.

This measure aims to ensure the City Council

is able to establish a general infrastructure and

harmonised processes in order to manage, use

and (partially) disseminate data, which is known

as data commons,

and that it is also able to

promote, implement and supervise projects

that capitalise on and enhance data in an agile,

uniform way (e.g. in terms of data interoperability

and standardisation) through the Municipal Data

Ofﬁce, and ensure the responsible management

of data in accordance with current legislation,

together with the Data Protection Ofﬁcer.

Although this measure refers to various aspects of IT resources, such as privacy, conﬁdentiality, information quality,

disclosure and statistical policy, these concepts will be treated and developed in later directives. Units must apply

the policies of this measure, and the directives and guidelines in a coherent and constant way.

Already under way at http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/en/digital-transformation/city-data-commons.

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

The main objectives of this measure are:

• To deﬁne the Municipal Data Ofﬁce’s ob-

jectives, mission, responsibilities and authority.

• To identify the structure and mechanisms

for data governance, in its broadest sense, in

Barcelona City Council.

• To deﬁne the main governing bodies

for the City Council’s actions regarding data,

centred on ethical use, data sovereignty, the

social aspect, guaranteeing privacy and secu-

rity, permanent access and the reuse of data.

• To ensure responsible data management

throughout its life cycle, respecting the FAIR

data principles (findable, accessible, intero-

perable and reusable).

• To deﬁne the data architecture, with its

data lake repository and City OS, as well as the

IT infrastructures needed to use it.

• To improve the internal and external use

of the City Council’s data, in order to add va-

lue and transform it into a real asset for high

corporate enhancement.

• To develop the procedures and mecha-

nisms for processing data as systematically and

automatically as possible, respecting current

legislation and without endangering the privacy,

conﬁdentiality and security of that data.

In order to achieve the programme’s objecti-

ves, certain steps are clearly necessary. Firstly,

for promoting and directing our vision of data

commons, we have to be able to propose and

offer innovative solutions and visions concer-

ning information for the general public. In order

to do this, we have to ensure a certain level of

internal alignment, in terms of available tech-

nology and data. We then have to explain our

vision and establish a clear dialogue with the

city’s stakeholders in order to jointly promote our

vision of data commons, with rules that must be

established. Finally, we have to be able to show

speciﬁc examples of the application of this vision

for the common good of city residents, in order

to ensure their support for our work.

This measure also presents current emble-

matic projects, through which these objec-

tives are starting to be achieved, along with

the structures, responsibilities and projects

they require.

2.2. Barcelona Data Commons

The current situation of municipal data has to

be transformed in order to turn it into a public

asset, or data commons, with deﬁned gover-

nance and rules that are created from the pers-

pective of data as a common asset. The public

and private perception of data has to change

from that of an asset that offers a competitive

advantage to one of a social “infrastructure”

that must be public in order to ensure common

well-being, and which is exchanged on a quid

pro quo basis. The more data there is, the higher

its quality, and the more conﬁdence there is in

the exchange and privacy rules for this common

asset, the better all the stakeholders taking part

will be able to perform.

In regard to this data commons perspective, the

aim of this measure is to establish the archi-

tecture, processes and operational standards

based on application programming interfaces

(API), which make it possible to group data

sources into a common data lake. This invol-

ves document-conﬁguration processes for the

datasets, as well as a mapping of the wealth

of general data present in the Administration

and an assessment of its quality. It also involves

getting this infrastructure prepared for (partial)

opening to external social stakeholders, with

the aim of providing support to the proposed

vision for the data-commons framework.

2.1. Goals

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

In order to promote and direct this concept

of data commons, the City Council has to

be able to propose and offer innovative so-

lutions and ideas concerning data relating

to the general public. In order to do this, we

have to ensure a certain level of internal alig-

nment in terms of available technology and

data. We then have to explain our concept

and establish a clear dialogue with the city’s

stakeholders in order to jointly promote our

concept of data commons, with rules that we

must jointly establish with the general public.

Finally, we have to be able to show specific

examples of the application of this data com-

mons concept to city residents, in order to

ensure their support for our work. This also

has to be achieved while recognising the need

to return the control of this data to the city

residents who produce it, so that they can

decide what they want to keep private and

what they want to share, and with whom and

under what conditions. This vision, based on

the concept of the general public’s data so-

vereignty, will take the form of experimental

projects, such as DECODE (see below) and

in the integration of new technologies, such

as distributed registries or blockchains and

data encryption.

BARCELONA DATA COMMONS

Quality

Robust

Citizens / Business

Academia / Communities

BCN Data

Analytics Ofﬁce

BCN Data Teams

Uses cases

Insight

BCN DATA

BCN

AGENCIES

TMB, BIM/SA, B:SM

Guàrdia Urbana, Housing

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

2.3. The Municipal Data Ofﬁce and

the Chief Data Ofﬁcer (CDO)

Barcelona recognises the opportunity for

demonstrating the proper use of data when

making informed decisions, as well as for de-

fining, analysing and resolving the challenges

currently facing big cities, and the need for

responsible and ethical management of this

data. By using this measure, it therefore es-

tablishes the mission and objectives of the

new Municipal Data Office (MDO) led by a

Chief Data Officer (CDO), while also provi-

ding it with the necessary (human, technical

and economic) resources to make use of the

data pertaining to the city and its residents

that is kept by the city. Barcelona is therefore

following the example of major North American

cities, such as Chicago, New York and Boston,

with their respective Chief Data Officers, and

more recently other European cities, such as

London and Paris, which, by designing a new

strategy and vision, consider data to be part

of the city’s own infrastructure.

In this case, through this government measure

and the action plan it contains, Barcelona be-

comes the first Spanish city to recognise the

importance of data, the first one to appoint

a CDO and the first one to create its own

data-lake and data-commons structures. This

should make it possible to produce informed

public policies by using the information pro-

vided by the data, its correct treatment and

the resulting analysis, and by opening up this

data to the civil and industrial sectors, as far

as possible, in order to strengthen the local

economy and the actions of civil society.

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Context

The City Council currently manages a lot of

data including many kinds of information con-

tent that need to be properly identiﬁed and

supervised, in order to ensure compliance with

the inherent functions of public service, while

respecting, and not infringing, the regulations

concerning privacy, conﬁdentiality, security,

transparency, access and reuse that current

legislation requires. Furthermore, we have

to be able to work on and manage this data

in a sustainable and appropriate way, in order

to provide it with added value and a social

aspect, transforming it into a real asset for

city residents and for the municipal council

itself. In the City Council, data is often kept

in “informative silos” or in vertical piles, which

means it cannot be easily shared between

departments. This has had a major effect on

the organisation and it is something that this

measure aims to change.

From a cultural point of view, in recent years,

the municipal organisation has gradually assu-

med the fact that municipal information is an

asset of common interest to the City Coun-

cil and city residents. Permanent access to

the data, whether it is public or restricted or

conﬁdential, empowers the communities that

have access to it, because it allows them to

take duly informed decisions and means that

they can be freer.

For city residents, municipal data is a source

of wealth that can help to break the cycle of

poverty and can form a basis for sustainable

human development. Access to public con-

tent is a basic democratic right that helps

to reduce the digital gap and empowers city

residents to decide and act freely in their

social, work and leisure activities, from an

individual and collective viewpoint. Correctly

managing and disseminating this data must

make it possible for city residents to have more

formed opinions and a desire to participate

in local affairs, guarantee a return on public

investment in society, facilitate control of the

Administration by city residents, accelerate

access to knowledge, foster collaborative work,

encourage innovation, which enriches edu-

cation and stimulates the economy, increases

productivity and helps to find new solutions

to tackle the challenges facing new societies,

which are constantly changing, in order to

increase competitiveness and promote the

progress of knowledge at a global level.

For the City Council, in the broadest sense of

the concept, the data that we generate, collect,

receive, store, process and share also has a

high intrinsic value. This places us in a privileged

position that we need to know how to make

the most of in order to share it with everyone.

It is necessary to manage these information

resources systematically and intelligently, taking

into account their entire life cycle, in order to

successfully transform them into an asset and

to construct the necessary tools and services

to get just-in-time data and make it available to

the departments and people who need it, be-

yond the limits imposed by right of access. For

the City Council, the beneﬁts of this systema-

tic process are also numerous: efﬁciency and

responsibility are increased, the institution’s

proﬁle is raised and our knowledge is increa-

sed. It is a permanent and continual source of

knowledge, because it is preserved properly,

it guarantees the institution’s reputation, it

improves transparency and accountability, it

3.1. Current situation

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

promotes reuse for the beneﬁt of everyone

and helps to improve productivity.

From an architectural point of view, the City

Council now has to rethink and develop ﬂexible

infrastructures, content and data, interoperable

procedures and services that make it possible

to change the data model and strategy in order

to share it with all the interested communi-

ties, applying general criteria and protocols and

adding speciﬁcations according to the various

departmental businesses and objectives.

The infrastructures have to include facilities,

technology and the expertise of human teams.

We have to see data from a broader pers-

pective, referring to all information resources,

including protected and open data, true digital

and digitalised data, and even subscription or

licensed electronic resources. The procedures

have to standardise vocabulary, apply meta-

data standards and guarantee interoperability

within the worldwide digital data ecosystem.

In addition to providing traditional information

and assistance services, they must be ﬂexible

in order to address other emerging needs in a

knowledge society that is changing so rapidly.

These strategies must be able to deﬁne a da-

ta-classiﬁcation model that takes into account

legal and security aspects at each stage of the

data’s life cycle, the tools for creating digital ob-

jects and assigning descriptive, administrative,

technical and preservation metadata, as well

as assigning univoc and persistent identiﬁers

and they also have to ensure that the data and

its metadata can be understood by humans

and by machines, i.e. in order to guarantee

open-access information that is easy to ﬁnd,

to share and which is machine readable. This

is a change of model, where the new value is

default access to municipal data. It is neces-

sary to systematically apply data evaluation and

selection procedures in order to also create

a preservation policy that is sustainable in the

long term, to plan the transfer to an analytic

repository, or if necessary, deﬁnitive placement

in a secure and veriﬁed repository so that the

data is permanently accessible, to apply con-

trolled vocabulary and standards, and with clear

licences of use that are machine readable in

order to enable individual or mass reuse, always

stating the original source, and disclosing the

existence of the data to city residents so that

they are aware of its existence and that they

have right of use.

This has important legal consequences, such as

those imposed by the new general data protec-

tion regulation (RGPD), which will be obligatory

for all public institutions from May 2018. It must

be stated that the City Council is working on

a plan for adapting to the RGPD and that it

has taken measures to that end. Dispersion of

data services could cause security problems

in the future (data dispersion can also mean

unauthorised access to personal information

by contractors and other players, although

at this time, no leaks of any kind have taken

place). For this reason, when what we want to

do with the data internally is discussed, there

are also architectural problems that must be

tackled. These problems include the need for a

uniﬁed point of access with sufﬁcient technical

capacity to manage large quantities of infor-

mation, but also an interoperability standard

for sharing data among services, systems and

applications (i.e. a uniﬁed API policy).

In terms of governance, there is a need for a

body, a municipal data department, that spear-

heads the new model, promotes the paradigm

shift within the organisation and assigns res-

ponsibilities in order to ensure that data is

managed as a real asset during its entire life

cycle, which will generate added value. This

government body has to carry out high-level

supervision and be empowered to take de-

cisions concerning possible data conﬂicts in

public tenders. Furthermore, it will have to

oversee a change in the City Council’s menta-

lity, aimed at achieving a data-based focus in

order to inform and take decisions concerning

the city’s problems.

Finally, in regard to exchanging data, the City

Council has played a discreet role until now. It

has maintained an open-data portal, but the

portal had low standards, and there was a lack

of decisive political support for opening up

data. In regard to contracting, there is basically

no concern about contract data, as it is not

considered to be an internal asset.

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

The conceptual plan must address the moti-

vation for this programme. We live in a digital

world, where access to technology makes it

possible to transform many aspects of society.

In particular, technology enables the scalability

of processes and services. This factor, along

with an ever-increasing availability of data for

measuring practically every aspect of people’s

lives (the so-called big data), could threaten

the levels of freedom enjoyed by the citizens

who live in our societies. Furthermore, althou-

gh the inherent scalability offered by these

technologies has positive consequences for

efficiency, it may also lead to an increase in

existing inequalities.

As a public administration, the City Council is

uniquely placed to ensure that this does not

happen. It must promote an agenda that is

explicitly geared towards ensuring the digital

rights of city residents while also acting as a fa-

cilitator for generating well-distributed wealth.

This wealth can be created through innovation

and exploiting data, which has been described

as “the new 21st century petroleum”:

However, like petroleum, data must be refined

using appropriate processes and skills, which

not all social stakeholders have to the same de-

gree. Therefore, a policy that merely defends

“open data” in the name of transparency, and

allows certain stakeholders access without any

clear strategy or regulations, may lead to a

society that is even more unequal. Although

data must be made public, we shouldn’t forget

that people’s capacities in terms of economic

power, knowledge and infrastructure are not

evenly distributed throughout the population.

Therefore, as a public body, we must clearly

change the current model of merely deman-

ding that the data is opened up “naturally”.

From a general perspective, public adminis-

trations must be the ones to spearhead this

vision. We have sufficient power to promote

our vision, as we have part of the critical in-

frastructures, major economic capacity, the

communicative range and, to start off with, a

significant body of data. A cultural change in

this direction can therefore be achieved by

encouraging the other stakeholders to come

on board and follow the City Council’s lead.

Furthermore, based on this government me-

asure, it is necessary to define a framework

that covers all the necessary actions con-

cerning data, in order to ensure continued

and permanent access under the FAIR data

principles promoted by European bodies and

especially by the Research Data Management

Working Group.

Finally, it must be taken into account that the

City Council acts as a protector of city resi-

dents’ data. It is therefore very important to

make this data available to them, so that it

is accessible to city residents and so that a

veriﬁable and trustworthy relationship can be

built up. However, for this to become a reality,

it is not enough for the data and the protocols

to be transparent. City residents must also

have the tools and knowledge to be able to

verify them. In a world that is becoming more

and more digitalised, this means that the City

Council must promote activities that help to

train city residents in digital knowledge. In order

to do this, it is necessary to make people more

aware of the importance of exercising digital

rights and to also provide the general public

with tools that allow them to understand the

implications, possibilities and dangers behind a

totally digitalised world, where a huge amount

of data on human activities is available.

3.2. Data-strategy motivations

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

The current ubiquity and volume of this data

and how easy it is to obtain, along with the

possibilities of data science, are opening up

many perspectives in terms of providing ser-

vices. However, it also makes it easy to seg-

ment the population and identify people and

put them under surveillance. This poses many

questions and challenges for society in general

and public administrations in particular. The

Municipal data is a strategic asset and a va-

luable resource that enables local government

to carry out its mission and its programmes

effectively. Appropriate access to municipal

data signiﬁcantly improves the value of the

information and the return on the investment

involved in generating it. In accordance with the

“Barcelona Digital City” plan and its empha-

sis on public innovation, the digital economy

and empowering city residents, this data-ma-

nagement strategy is based on the following

considerations.

Within this context, this new management and

use of data has to respect and comply with the

essential values applicable to data. For Barce-

lona City Council, these values are:

• Shared municipal knowledge. Munici-

pal data, in its broadest sense, has a signiﬁcant

social dimension and provides the general pu-

Essential values

of the programme

4.1. Essential values

virtual dimension and the sovereignty of city

residents in this area is a subject of interest

because of the repercussions these aspects

can have on the analogue world. Administra-

tions have to be prepared and make an effort

to design a consistent strategy in this area. This

must make it possible to ensure democracy,

people’s full rights and their confidence in

public institutions.

blic with past, present and future knowledge

concerning the government, the city, society,

the economy and the environment.

• The strategic value of data. The council

must manage data as a strategic value, with

an innovative vision, in order to turn it into an

intellectual asset for the organisation.

• Geared towards results. Municipal

data is also a means of ensuring the adminis-

tration’s accountability and transparency, for

managing services and investments and for

maintaining and improving the performance of

the economy, wealth and the general public’s

well-being.

• Data as a common asset. City resi-

dents and the common good have to be the

central focus of the Municipality of Barcelona’s

plans and technological platforms. Data is a

source of wealth that empowers people who

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have access to it. Making it possible for city

residents to control the data, minimising the

digital gap and preventing discriminatory or

unethical practices is the essence of municipal

technological sovereignty.

• Transparency and interoperability.

Public institutions must be open, transparent

and responsible towards the general public.

Promoting openness and interoperability,

subject to technical and legal requirements,

increases the efﬁciency of operations, reduces

costs, improves services, supports needs and

increases public access to valuable municipal

information. In this way, it also promotes public

participation in government.

• Reuse and open-source licences. Ma-

king municipal information accessible, usable

by everyone by default, without having to ask

for prior permission, and analysable by anyone

who wishes to do so can foster entrepreneu-

rship, social and digital innovation, jobs and

excellence in scientiﬁc research, as well as

improving the lives of Barcelona residents and

making a signiﬁcant contribution to the city’s

stability and prosperity.

• Quality and security. The city gover-

nment must take ﬁrm steps to ensure and

maximise the quality, objectivity, usefulness,

integrity and security of municipal information

before disclosing it, and maintain processes

to effectuate requests for amendments to the

publicly-available information.

• Responsible organisation. Adding value

to the data and turning it into an asset, with the

aim of promoting accountability and citizens’

rights, requires new actions, new integrated

procedures, so that the new platforms can

grow in an organic, transparent and cross-de-

partmental way. A comprehensive governan-

ce strategy makes it possible to promote this

revision and avoid redundancies, increased

costs, inefﬁciency and bad practices.

• Care throughout the data’s life cy-

cle. Paying attention to the management

of municipal registers, from when they are

created to when they are destroyed or pre-

served, is an essential part of data manage-

ment and of promoting public responsibility.

Being careful with the data throughout its

life cycle combined with activities that ensu-

re continued access to digital materials for

as long as necessary, help withthe analytic

exploitation of the data, but also with the

responsible protection of historic municipal

government registers and safeguarding the

economic and legal rights of the municipal

government and the city’s residents.

• Privacy “by design”. Protecting privacy

is of maximum importance. The City Council

has to consider and protect individual and

collective privacy during the data life cycle,

systematically and veriﬁably, as speciﬁed in the

general regulation for data protection (Regula-

tion 2016/679 of the European Parliament and

of the Council) with particular emphasis on

informed consent, minimisation of information

and limiting to purpose, in an explainable, safe

way and in accordance with the law.

• Security. Municipal information is a stra-

tegic asset subject to risks, and it has to be

managed in such a way as to minimise those

risks. This includes privacy, data protection,

algorithmic discrimination and cybersecuri-

ty risks that must be speciﬁcally established,

promoting ethical and responsible data archi-

tecture, techniques for improving privacy and

evaluating the social effects. Although security

and privacy are two separate, independent

ﬁelds, they are closely related, and it is essential

for the units to take a coordinated approach in

order to identify and manage cybersecurity and

risks to privacy with applicable requirements

and standards.

• Technological sovereignty. When new

equipment, IT resources or support infrastruc-

tures and services are planned, budgeted or

purchased, the subsequent contracting pro-

cess and speciﬁcations must be in line with

the priorities of the “Barcelona Digital City”

plan. In order to comply with the technological

sovereignty objective set out in the Agile Digital

Transformation Strategy and the digital service

standards, especially for preventing dependen-

cy on suppliers (vendor lock-in), the following

guidelines, which expand on the technology and

innovation principles governing the Municipal

Institute of Information Technology (IMI) are as

follows: interoperability, agility, ethics and the

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opening up of knowledge and technologies (for

both software and data).

• Open standards. It is obligatory for

the City Council’s digital services to use open

standards, and in particular the content of the

catalogue of standards from the Technical In-

teroperability Standard (as implemented under

Royal Decree 4/2010) or the internationally

accepted open standards that update, replace

or complement these standards. Where no

approved open standard exists in the required

format, a proposed format shall be submitted

pursuant to the applicable regulations and the

requirements of the IMI’s open standards.

• Agile methodology. The technological

projects that are implemented for the mana-

gement, analysis and dissemination of council

data must preferably be carried out in accor-

dance with the methodology deﬁned in the

Code of Technological Practices, published

in the corresponding Barcelona City Council

government measure in October 2017.

“Data sovereignty” is a concept linked to German

constitutional law, people’s right to their own

information (where digital information concer-

ning an individual is not subject to the control

of a third party, and in particular, of people

or systems that treat data in a third country,

with regulations that are alien to the location

of that individual)

Most of the current concerns about data sove-

reignty refer to compliance with privacy regu-

lations and preventing data stored in a foreign

country from being intercepted by the govern-

ment of the host country or of that government

having access to it. But the concept of data

sovereignty is broader than this international

dimension and it involves the need for an in-

dividual to have control, at all times and in all

relevant systems, over the collection, storage,

use, transfer and publication of their data, whe-

ther it be of a technical, scientiﬁc, economic,

social or personal nature.

Organisations increasingly adopt services based

in foreign IT systems and, in particular, the cloud,

in order to enjoy the beneﬁts of not having to

buy, manage, update and replace systems and

4.2. Data sovereignty

applications. As one of the main objectives of

using the cloud is to enable access to infor-

mation and systems any time and anywhere,

many organisations do not much care where

their data is stored, or that it could escape from

their control and be accessed by unauthorised

persons or even made publicly available.

Data sovereignty presents technical and legal

challenges when local systems and stores of

third-party information are moved, particularly

to the cloud.

In this context, the City Council’s information

systems have to be determined and conﬁgured

at all times, in order to guarantee the City Coun-

cil’s sovereignty over its data, and in particular,

over the (personal) data of the city’s residents,

which is administered by the City Council for

providing its services. The City Council has to

have the ability, at all times, to access its data,

process it and make “local” security copies.

Furthermore the City Council’s organisations and

bodies must always respect the applicable data

protection regulations regarding the access to

and treatment of data by third parties, as well

as international data transfers.

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Barcelona City Council is committed to the

ethical use of data. This principle is structured

in accordance with the following main values:

• Transparency: at all times, both the City

Council and the city’s residents know why

and for whom the data is being collected, and

the applicable measures for guaranteeing its

ethical use.

• Tracing: at all times the City Council

knows the origin of the data, its permitted uses

and the applicable restrictions.

• Diligence: collaborators and the providers

of data-related services comply with the same

principles and obligations as the City Council,

and the City Council oversees this compliance.

• Privacy: any use of personal data must

comply with data-protection regulations, and

in particular with the principles applicable to its

treatment, including fairness, integrity and accu-

racy, purpose limitation and data minimisation.

• Trust: data must always be used in ac-

cordance with the general public’s expecta-

tions, and the City Council must implement

control and feedback systems to gauge this

compliance.

• Responsibility: The City Council assu-

mes responsibility for all data uses that are

undertaken.

• Beneﬁt: the data must always be used

for the beneﬁt of city residents and society.

All projects that involve the processing of city

data must comply with these principles.

Furthermore, many of today’s operations and

decisions, which used to be carried out by hu-

man beings, are increasingly being delegated

to algorithms, which can advise, if not decide,

how the collected data should be interpre-

ted and processed by information systems

and what actions should be taken as a result.

More and more often, these algorithms affect

social processes, business transactions and

4.3. The ethical use of data

governmental decisions, as well as the way we

perceive, understand and interact with each

other and our surroundings. The differences

between the design and operation of these

algorithms and our understanding of what

they involve can have serious ethical con-

sequences that affect individual people and

groups of citizens. It is essential for the de-

cisions made by the City Council using algo-

rithms based on our data to be accountable

(applying the concept of algorithmic accoun-

tability) and that they ensure the ethical prin-

ciples of respecting rights, justice, the con-

cept of fairness, well-being and virtue.

As part of this measure, a DMO working group

will be set up to identify the subjects raised

by algorithmic determinism relating to auto-

mated decisions taken by the City Council,

and to identify the necessary measures for

ensuring the following ethical principles, in

order to determine if instruction on the sub-

ject will be needed in the future, with the aim

of establishing applicable regulations for the

ethical use of data and algorithms in Barcelo-

na City Council.

• Transparency: the right of city residents

(including the staff of the City Council and re-

lated organisations) to be informed about auto-

mated decisions and their underlying algorithms.

• Due process: the right of city residents to

take action and initiate appeals relating to data

processing and the automated decisions that

affect them.

• Accountability and proportionality: ensu-

ring that automated decisions are fair and pro-

portional, and that they do not prejudice city

residents (in particular, that they are not discri-

minatory in any way).

Within this context, algorithmic accountability

is supported by the transparency of the City

Council’s open source code IT systems invol-

ved in decision-making (or for supporting deci-

sion-making). Wherever possible, projects ba-

sed on data (data driven) will be able to check

the algorithms using simulations based on city

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data. Likewise, using open source code or other

means, third-party technology suppliers must

reveal the underlying logic behind any IT pro-

cess for automated decisions (or for supporting

decision-making) pertaining to any of their sys-

tems used by the City Council.

Ethical values and principles must be conside-

red as intrinsic features of the City Council’s

data model and data governance, and the wor-

king group will help to build this data model and

appropriate controls for its governance, and to

establish a process for providing an ethical eva-

luation of any development project.

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Scope

of application

The municipal executive structure and its de-

pendent bodies are responsible for putting

the actions and requirements arising from this

measure into practice.

They are applicable to management activities

that use any IT resources of any kind (unless

expressly excluded) that collect, store, use or

publish data, including information in paper and

electronic mediums. When an organisation ca-

The data referred to by this measure inclu-

des all municipal data, understood as both

the municipal data and metadata and the da-

ta-management systems that make continual

access, use, reuse and preservation possible. In

regard to municipal data, it is possible to make

a conceptual distinction between various large

information deposits / information groups:

• Management, administrative and te-

chnical data. These are the data groups that

municipal manager’s ofﬁces and organisations

This measure is applicable to the following

organisations and data.

rries out an order or acts as a service provider,

the ultimate responsibility for the application

of this strategy’s requirements rests with the

receiving management or organisation.

In regard to security and protection systems,

the directives and executive orders defined

in municipal guidelines and regulations must

be applied.

use to carry out their missions. This data co-

mes from, for example, ﬁles, sensors or city

residents themselves. This group includes the

concept of big data.

• Open data and sets of raw data and

open metadata. These are the datasets that

the municipal council makes available to the

public. Furthermore, the website platform

that serves them has a system for searching,

visualising and downloading. It also has an API

that provides access.

5.1. Organisations and systems

5.2. Data

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• Official statistics. The set of statistics

obtained by the City Council concerning various

datasets and which are listed as ofﬁcial statis-

tics by IDESCAT, the ofﬁcial Catalan statistics

organisation.

• Open Content (BCNROC): This is data

produced by the municipality, published in

municipal documents. The content is of all

kinds, text-based, number-based, visual, etc.

which are found or conﬁgured in public do-

cuments produced or ﬁnanced by Barcelona

City Council. This means that the City Council

is the author and makes them available digitally

and permanently to city residents, using stan-

dard metadata schemes in order to guarantee

interoperability, Creative Commons licences

to allow the documents to be reused, uniform

resource identiﬁers (URI) that ensure a perma-

nent link to digital networks and open formats

to facilitate the semantic web.

• External data (CBAB). These are infor-

mation resources from sources external to the

City Council, produced by third party authors,

which the organisation compiles because they

are needed for internal work. It is organised and

accessible from the SEDAC corporate catalogue.

When we talk about data today, we have to

speak about technology. The Digital Transfor-

mation Plan (DTP) aims to change the way the

City Council purchases and manages techno-

logy and interacts with the general public. At

present, Barcelona is very attractive for tech-

nological companies of various sizes, and it is

also generating new practices in the market in

terms of business models that pivot on open

code and open-service practices.

The DTP’s

objective is to establish a playing ﬁeld where

SMEs and other economic players that are not

large corporations can enter the “game” with a

chance of winning tenders related to technology

and data. This has the advantage of diversifying

the City Council’s suppliers, avoiding the clo-

sure of suppliers and also promotes a circular

economy, where the beneﬁts of public money

are reinvested in city stakeholders, while the

public money invested in developing services

is kept open in a predetermined way for the

community. Therefore, the link between the

purchasing of data and technology is important

because of the programme’s scope, although

this is obviously not the main concern.

In this sense, this measure’s provisions must

be applied to all acquisition and technology

and service management contracts that work

with data. City Council organisations will have

to detail in the application speciﬁcations the

responsibilities of suppliers regarding data and,

where appropriate, their function as the people

responsible for data processing.

Furthermore, these provisions are extended

to all City Council interactions with the “com-

munity” involved, i.e. all the possible reusers or

proactive consumers (prosumers) of the data

that the City Council makes public as open data:

activists, data journalists, NGOs, foundations and

associations in a non-economic environment, as

well as business people, emerging companies,

companies related to information sciences and

major companies in the business world, and

ﬁnally, academic research institutes.

5.3. Environment and ecosystem

See the government measure of October 2017.

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Governance of

municipal data:

the Municipal

Data Ofﬁce

This Strategy for the responsible and ethical

use of data entails an organisational change

The Municipal Data Ofﬁce (MDO) has been

created. This is a directorate made up of various

other directorates and departments that, until

now, have had missions concerning council

data The Municipal Data Ofﬁce is located in

the Municipal Manager’s Ofﬁce and answers

to the Commission for Technology and Digital

Information (CTID).

The MDO is responsible for the management,

quality, governance and exploitation of data

relating to Barcelona City Council and all its

associated bodies (public and private) that

provide services to the general public. The

director of the DMO. the Chief Data Ofﬁcer,

(CDO) carries out this task by means of:

• The promotion, execution and supervi-

sion of data exploitation projects needed by

City Council departments. Relevant city players

from the data sector are also involved. In order

to carry out this task, there is an ofﬁce for mul-

ti-disciplinary support.

• The establishment of standardised proto-

cols throughout the organisation and a precise

mapping of all the existing wealth of data under

the umbrella of the City Council, creating a clas-

siﬁcation for all the data and the promotion of

appropriate processing, care and preservation

policies for each one.

• Furthermore, their ofﬁce will oversee res-

ponsible data management, in accordance with

current legislation concerning privacy, through

coordination with the data protection ofﬁcer

(DPO) and will supervise the integration of the

data generated by new contracts and services

into the municipal structure.

• Management and monitoring of council-da-

ta governance.

The Municipal Data Ofﬁce is an opportunity

to stand out in the ﬁeld of data, at municipal,

community, national and European levels, and

this is happening at a good time. This is ob-

viously a venture for the future and the present,

as data is inundating each and every area of

our lives, and in the near future, every munici-

pal service will be likely to generate data. This

means that, as an organisation, we have to be

prepared and have a solid strategy for how to

manage this data and, where necessary, exploit

it in order to improve the services provided

for the general public.

6.1. Organisation: the Municipal Data Ofﬁce

that should enable the proper application of

the provisions that include it.

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Due to the nature of its activities, the Ofﬁ-

ce must have an inter-disciplinary, coherent

team. Normally, the required proﬁles (from

the Ofﬁce or through contact with other City

Council units) would be administrative (data

governance, speciﬁcations), legal (privacy and

licence aspects) technical in various disciplines

(knowledge of existing data architecture and

the actions needed during their life cycle in

order to turn them into an asset, as well as

technical procedures for ensuring the FAIR

use of the data), analytic (one of the Ofﬁce’s

latest objectives is to carry out data scien-

ce), graphic (there will be a constant need

for communicating knowledge extracted from

the data through visual means) and ﬁnally, a

business perspective (the Ofﬁce will have to

provide services to various City Council units).

Furthermore, another Ofﬁce objective will be

promoting the management of change, with the

aim of transforming the organisation’s culture,

promoting the standardisation of data-mana-

gement protocols and encouraging the various

municipal players to share data and receive

training in this area. This requires decisive poli-

tical support, which will provide the new ofﬁce

with resources and the authority to carry out

the ambitious tasks it is charged with.

Beyond political support, in order to achieve

this end, the Ofﬁce or the CDO must be con-

sidered as a service provider by the other City

Council units. This means that the Ofﬁce must

provide useful information and work side by side

with the other units, in order to educate them

in data culture and encourage them to continue

on their own once the collaboration comes to an

end. For this reason, it has to be situated in an

appropriate location and with suitable ofﬁces.

The MDO’s main functions and responsibilities

are established in the directive that accom-

panies this measure.

The CTID must be part of the governan-

ce committees which provide information

about decisions that include IT resources

and data, in order to facilitate advanced

information from resources for programme

objectives. After consultation with other

manager’s offices, the CTID can delegate

its functions to other technical personnel.

The CTID requires data security and privacy

to be completely integrated into the system

of data use and evaluation measures at a mu-

nicipal level, and it can recommend that an

organisation’s manager’s office modify, stop

or finalise any purchase, investment or activity

that includes significant IT components, based

on the CTID’s evaluations of the terms of the

contracts and current legislation.

A process will be established whereby the CTID

will regularly coordinate with project managers

in order to evaluate the IT resources and the

data-management processes that support

the aims and mission of each municipal body.

The CTID and the people responsible for the

programme must share the responsibility for

ensuring that the IT resources and present and

future municipal datasets adequately provide

the value they apply to the manager’s offices

and municipal bodies.

The manager’s offices and bodies will have to

comply with the regulations and instructions

for the management of data, information

and municipal documents from executive

bodies, which will be developed under the

Responsible Data-Management Strategy led

by the Commission for Technology and Di-

gital Innovation.

la OMD con respecto a la gestión de datos, de

la información y de los documentos municipales

que se deriven desde los órganos ejecutivos, y

que se desarrollarán a partir de esta estrategia

de gestión responsable de datos liderada por la

Comisionada de Tecnología e Innovación Digital.

6.2. Supervision: Commission for Technology

and Digital Innovation (CTID)

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In order to deploy the strategy for the res-

ponsible and ethical use of data, the following

areas of action have been established, which

we will detail below, together with the actions

and emblematic projects associated with them.

In general, the strategy pivots on the following

general principals, which form the basis for

the strategic areas described in this section.

GOVERNANCE POLICIES

AND PROCESSES

As a support for the purpose and functions of

municipal manager’s ofﬁces and bodies, and in

coordination with the people in charge of data,

the municipal processes, standards and policies

applicable to all the organisation’s data resour-

ces will have to be deﬁned, put into practice

and maintained.

Subsidiary municipal bodies must obtain this

from the CTID, in coordination with the go-

vernance committees, where processes and

policies will be deﬁned in sufﬁcient detail in

order to manage data resources appropriately.

As a minimum, these processes and policies will

require any investments and projects under

development to be evaluated, in order to deter-

mine the applicability of the agile methodology,

data standards and open content, privacy and

the ethical and social impact 1. as well as the

indicators for measuring the cost, use and gene-

ral evaluation of the data resources as a whole.

Strategic areas7

7.1. The deployment of the new data governance

It must be ensured that:

• There is a single review policy for each

organisation for evaluating the investments, the

analysis of operations and the other evaluation

systems for IT resources, including the projects

under development and ongoing activities.

• Information and data needs will be ma-

naged in accordance with the organisation’s go-

vernance policies, where the functions, respon-

sibilities and processes that the organisation’s

personnel use for treating data as an asset are

clearly established, along with the relationship

between technology, data, the organisation’s

programmes, strategies, legal requirements,

mission and operational objectives.

• Obsolete information systems will be

replaced as quickly as possible and budgetary

planning will include items corresponding to

depreciation.

• Data sovereignty

• Open data and transparency

• The exchange and reuse of data

• Political decision-making informed by data

• The life cycle of data and continual or per-

manent access

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LEADERSHIP AND

HUMAN RESOURCES

Subsidiary municipal bodies must develop a

set of requirements and skills for the teams

responsible for or working with data, which

will include aspects concerning access, analy-

sis, privacy and security, among others. More

speciﬁcally, it must be ensured that the teams

responsible for data are able to foresee inno-

vation and adapt to it, in a context of constant

change. The department of Human Resources

must ensure that the executive/management

personnel dealing with data have sufﬁcient

knowledge to carry out their task appropria-

tely. The people in charge of the organisation

must supervise how their data personnel ca-

rry out their functions, as well as coordinating

with the CTID and the CDO in order to select

the staff.

PRIVACY

In compliance with Regulation (EU) 2106/679,

the City Council will appoint a council Data

Protection Ofﬁcer (DPO) to assume the func-

tions assigned to that ofﬁcer under this regu-

lation.

Subsidiary municipal bodies must establish and

maintain a data-protection programme, in ac-

cordance with the municipal policy on privacy,

which ensures compliance with privacy requi-

rements and develops, evaluates and manages

the risks associated with privacy. When eva-

luating risks to privacy, privacy systems must

take into account risks concerning the people

associated with the creation, collection, use,

treatment, storage, maintenance, dissemina-

tion and destruction of personal data.

In accordance with municipal policy and the

law, municipal organisations and bodies may

only create, collect, use, store or disclose per-

sonal data if they have the appropriate autho-

risation. This authority must be clearly identi-

ﬁed in their data management software (DMS)

and in the architecture document (AD).

The bodies have to designate an RDAD and a

data-protection ofﬁcer who is responsible for

their data and who are answerable for deve-

loping, putting into practice and maintaining

privacy programmes in order to ensure com-

pliance with all regulations, norms and directi-

ves that affect the life cycle of personal data,

by means of a privacy policy that applies legal

measures to privacy risks. The CTID and the

corporate personnel responsible for data, the

CDO and the DPO, will have authority over the

sub-DPOs in each organisation and will coor-

dinate them.

The principles for personal data protection

must be respected, and the details of those

principles must be established under the res-

ponsibility of the DPO. Speciﬁcally, these will

include:

• Impact assessments. Municipal units will

carry out impact assessments for data protec-

tion to preventively ensure that, where pro-

cessing operations may involve especially se-

rious risks, the necessary measures are taken

to reduce, as far as possible, the risk of injuring

or harming people or negatively affecting their

rights and freedoms by obstructing or limiting

the exercising of those rights or their content.

• Privacy by design / PET The necessary

measures must be taken to incorporate privacy

by design strategies and/or privacy enhancing

technologies (PETs), through which the privacy

of those concerned is taken into account du-

ring all design, development and management

processes for the City Council’s data systems.

Wherever applicable, encryption, anonymi-

sation and pseudo-anonymisation algorithms

must be used.

DATA SECURIT Y

In order to guarantee appropriate data securi-

ty levels and to ensure conﬁdentiality and co-

rrect use, the CTID must designate a person in

charge of data security, a Data Security Ofﬁcer

(DSO), who will be responsible for developing

and maintaining a security programme for the

unit’s data, in accordance with pertinent legis-

lation and in collaboration with the Technical

Commission for Data Protection Security.

The data will be protected in accordance with

the risk arising from unauthorised access to,

the use, disclosure, interruption, modiﬁcation

or destruction of this information. The units

must produce a recovery plan that includes

continuity strategies, in order to ensure that

services and access can be restored in time

to satisfy the mission’s needs. Furthermore,

any information project or system must gua-

rantee the possibility of tracing access to the

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data and the analysis of decision-making algo-

rithms (or those supporting decision-making)

and prepare and facilitate any audits that may

be undertaken. Any third party involved in the

processing of municipal data must offer sufﬁ-

cient guarantees concerning the implementa-

tion and maintenance of the required security

measures, and the other directives deﬁned in

the Code of Technological Practices and the

Technical Commission for Security.

All projects and systems must comply with cu-

rrent laws and regulations, including the Ge-

neral Data Protection Regulation, the Spani-

sh data protection law, Decree 3/2010, of 8

January, which regulates the National Security

Scheme for Electronic Administration, and in-

ternational security regulations, in particular

regulation ISO/IEC 27002:2005, which establi-

shes guidelines and general principles for ini-

tiating, putting into practice, maintaining and

improving the information security manage-

ment in an organisation.

The physical or logical security of data will be

determined by the IMI-deﬁned standards.

COLLABORATION,

COORDINATION AND

SUPERVISION

General data governance is described in the

directive that accompanies this measure, in

Appendix 10.1. This is comprised of the In-

ter-departmental Coordination of Data. Its

main aim is to coordinate cross-departmental

projects and to act as a means of dissemina-

ting the projects.

For proper coordination between the various

areas of municipal management, data ofﬁcers

will be deﬁned for each sector, who will be res-

ponsible for the data in their own manager’s

ofﬁce and for coordination with the council as

a whole. Cross-departmental data coordina-

tion makes it possible to establish directives for

and monitor the work carried out in the MDO

and in the various sectoral centres for storing,

analysing and disseminating municipal data; es-

tablishing operational and treatment criteria for

guaranteeing all aspects of the data’s life cycle

and added value; the monitoring of inter-de-

partmental and council projects, as well as the

management of data protection and the re-

gulations concerning intellectual property and

authorship protection for the data.

This coordination must lead to the proper

management and review of resources and

programmes, and ensure coordinated and

uniﬁed budget management. The CDO will

also take part, for the review and authorisa-

tion, with the aim of providing effective, spe-

ciﬁc and visible corporate management of IT

resources and data.

Each unit’s manager’s ofﬁce, in consultation

with municipal data ofﬁcers, must describe

the processes used to deﬁne the inventory of

IT resources for efﬁciently achieving manage-

ment objectives, considering new investments

in IT and their potential and appropriateness

for the council inventory. It will also be neces-

sary to identify the differences between the

programmed and executed budget, the sche-

dules and the evaluation of IT objectives, and

ensure that the necessary corrective measu-

res are carried out.

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This tool establishes principles and directives

for correct data management, in accordance

with the principles indicated in this measure.

The more technical aspects of this manage-

ment are included in the Code of Technolo-

gical Practices, published under the Gover-

nment Measure for open digitalisation: free

software and the agile development of servi-

ces, of October 2017.

Subsidiary municipal bodies must manage data

responsibly, inventory and register the autho-

rised treatment processes, identify the data’s

sources and its basic metadata, guarantee the

data’s life cycle and take users into account

when determining the format and frequency

of updates, as well as other data management

considerations. They must collaborate with

other organisations on the promotion of efﬁ-

cient public services in order to comply with

all the transparency policies and those related

to privacy, security and accessibility.

Speciﬁcally, municipal bodies must follow all

the processes established by the DPO regar-

ding strict compliance with data protection

regulations, notify the Catalan Data Protec-

tion Authority about the creation of databa-

ses where necessary, and appoint the people

in charge of data. It is necessary to minimise

the collection of personal data, apply anony-

misation or pseudo-anonymisation wherever

possible, obtain the consent of the people

concerned, and take into account the reper-

cussions that every action at each moment of

the data’s life cycle has on every other mo-

ment and the people concerned.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR

ETHICAL AND RESPONSIBLE

DATA MANAGEMENT

Subsidiary municipal bodies must include the

following steps in their planning, budgeting and

management, where appropriate:

• Municipal data must be ethically mana-

ged during its entire life cycle (creation, co-

llection, storage, use, analysis, dissemination,

archiving and destruction).

• Municipal information is managed as a

common asset and its access, consultation

and use by the public is made possible on the

basis of the legal provisions in force.

• Activities carried out on the data in a set

of metadata must be registered, following the

most appropriate metadata schemes for the

operations of each business.

• Privacy and security risks will be identiﬁed

throughout the data’s life cycle, and risk analy-

ses and security solutions will be developed.

• Management will involve a clear alloca-

tion of roles and responsibilities in order to

promote the efﬁcient design and operation of

all management processes.

The municipal bodies must provide the gene-

ral public with the information in a way that is

coherent with its objectives and mission, based

on current legislation. Anonymised data must

be provided, so that access, analysis and reuse

of the data can be promoted for a wide range

of purposes. The information must be publi-

cly accessible and automated, and it must be

correctly described, complete and up to date.

This also includes data being available in for-

mats that are accessible to people with func-

tional diversity. It is necessary to consider the

cost of this public service for the organisation,

as the imposition of charges or public prices

should be avoided.

Municipal bodies must store information in such

a way as to allow interoperability between in-

formation systems and, wherever appropriate,

its public disclosure by means of open formats,

data and metadata standards. The organisations

must also make mechanisms for obtaining feed-

back on the data available to the general public.

Municipal ﬁnance systems must be able to

reward the units that include systems for the

long-term preservation of data and its access

in their service contracts.

7.2. Ethical and responsible data management

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The City Council and all municipal group units

must observe a set of procedures aimed at

improving the acquisition of data and which

make effective, economical, safe, ethical and

open data management possible, as well as

guaranteeing privacy. Planning has to focus on

the data that supports each unit’s mission, and

they have to implement management proces-

ses that are integrated into budgetary pro-

gramming and execution.

PLANNING AND BUDGET

Budgetary planning is an essential part of pro-

ducing and maintaining a data management

strategy, and it must ensure effective collabo-

ration between the various manager’s ofﬁces

and directorates in this area of management.

Strategic planning: data management plans

(DMP). As a support for Barcelona City Coun-

cil’s management needs and its mission, and

as part of the general strategy and planning

to improve the municipal group’s processes,

each unit must produce and maintain its own

data management plan (DMP) that descri-

bes the objectives of IT resources, including,

among others, the processes described in this

strategy. The DMP must show how the map of

the IT resource objectives relates to the unit’s

mission and priorities. The objectives must be

speciﬁc, measurable and veriﬁable, so that

their progress can be monitored.

One example of an emblematic project in the

budgetary area is Open Budget, a tool that fa-

cilitates the general public’s analysis and un-

derstanding of Barcelona City Council’s bud-

gets. Open Budget allows users to download

data in open formats, to browse items ranging

from the most aggregated to the most detai-

led budgetary data, for both the current ﬁscal

year and previous years. (http://ajuntament.

barcelona.cat/estrategiaifinances/pressu-

postobert/ca/).

INVENTORY

Business units will have to keep an inventory

of their main information systems, containers

and dissemination tools, with a determined

level of detail for their supervision and ma-

nagement. This inventory must identify the

datasets containing personal information and

procedures will be determined to enable re-

gular checks that ensure this data is of the ne-

cessary quality, that it is possible to respond to

the rights of the people concerned and that it

is the minimum required to develop the unit’s

powers and functions. Each unit will also have

to keep a record of all the actions taken regar-

ding both management and analytical databa-

ses. The Municipal Data Ofﬁce must determine

the metadata for these systems.

MANAGEMENT OF DATA

PROCESSING SYSTEMS

The units and subsidiary bodies must be able

to continually facilitate the adoption of new te-

chnologies and to evaluate the entire life cycle

of each information system, with an inventory

of the software tools and machines associated

with the system, the management and sustai-

nability of the resources and the infrastructu-

res supporting the system; they must actively

determine the updates, revisions, substitu-

tions and provisions needed to properly carry

out the unit’s functions and protect its assets,

and it must ensure the terms and conditions of

the contracts and other service agreements

involved in the collection, processing, storage,

access, exchange and availability of municipal

information, which are conﬁrmed and in line

with the data-protection policy and cover the

units’ legal and ethical requirements.

RISK MANAGEMENT

Units must evaluate the security measures for

information and data, records management,

transparency, impact assessment and supply

chains, and they must do so during the entire

data cycle, so that the risks are assessed and

managed. Furthermore, in coordination with

Each unit’s inventory will be integrated into one of the municipal group’s general inventories.l.

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the DPO, the CDO and the CTID, they must

produce a plan so that the information sys-

tems are duly protected and ensured, while

updating, revision, substitution and with-

drawal are given the highest level of priority.

It is also necessary to periodically review and

report on the risks concerning processes,

people and technologies.

RESILIENCE PLAN

Municipal units and subsidiary bodies must pro-

duce a resilience plan that takes into account

the management of their data. This resilience

plan is crucial for ensuring services are able to

continue carrying out their tasks during disrup-

tions. It is therefore necessary for organisations

to develop continuity strategies in order to en-

sure that services can be re-established in time

to meet their objectives. “Manual shortcuts”

must be part of this, so that critical operations

can have continuity while normal services have

not been resumed.

This line of action aims to deﬁne the conditions

at the architectural level in order to make the

City Council’s internal management more agile,

improve the services that the City Council offers

city residents and facilitate the joint exchange

of interesting data with society, both inside and

outside the municipal government, and to en-

sure its preservation and continual access. The

CDO and their ofﬁce will be responsible for un-

derstanding the City Council’s data and having

a uniﬁed, documented concept of it, as well as

maintaining, planning and developing its archi-

tecture by using a uniﬁed management model.

The City Council therefore has to work towards

a model of grouped data from different sour-

ces in order to create common repositories for

management, analysis and secure preservation.

These repositories are:

• Data lake. A single analytic repository is

created, a data lake, where the data input and

consumption or access points are centralised.

These single input and access points make it

possible to improve security and have bet-

ter traceability. Furthermore, the data lake,

which must be based on a type of big-data

infrastructure, must include the availability of

a precise map of the City Council’s data. This

means that the CDO must prioritise the possi-

ble development or deﬁnition of datasets, and

the rights of data access and exploitation that

are included in or excluded from the data lake.

The CDO will also be responsible for ensuring

data quality. This data lake is the current em-

blematic City OS project.

7.3. City Data Infrastructure

This includes machinery, software, ﬁrmware components not maintained by their developers, salespersons or

manufacturers, through the availability of pieces of software, ﬁrmware updates, spare parts and maintenance

contracts.

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City OS is a cross-departmental deposit and

architecture project for the centralised, uni-

form storage and access of the city’s data. It is

the sole analytic repository for municipal data.

Municipal data as a whole is stored in various

systems according to the needs of use and the

technology that is applied. City OS provides an

analytical layer for all the data. It has been de-

veloped in such a way as to allow autonomous

management of the knowledge of the variety of

municipal data by the operational data-ma-

nagement systems. In other words, it makes

data analysis and operational management

independent. The data is organised according

to a system of ontologies geared to creating

analytical knowledge.

• A secure, veriﬁed municipal repository:

This repository for archive preservation must

guarantee continual access to all municipal

data, registers and information resources that,

after undergoing archive-evaluation proces-

ses, have been selected for permanent pre-

servation. The secure repository must guaran-

tee the authenticity of the data it stores and

avoid the obsolescence of digital materials,

while permitting the long-term sustainability

of this tool.

It will be necessary to write an information poli-

cy that includes all the data and obligatory pro-

cesses needed to complete the data life cycle

and deposit it in the city lake or in the secure

preservation repository, according to prefe-

rence. In order to do this, close collaboration

from the IMI (technology provider and respon-

sible for the development and maintenance of

the City Council’s technological infrastructure)

and from the various units and services that

have their own infrastructures.

Units must develop an architectural description

(AD) that details the available architecture, the

target architecture and the plan to achieve the

latter. Each unit’s AD must be in line with the

data model deﬁned by the MDO. The AD must

include the unit’s plans for signiﬁcant changes

in up-dating, revisions, substitution or avai-

lability of information when the systems no

longer effectively support the required needs

and functions. The AD must align operational

resources and technologies in order to attain

Managing the Publication of Results

Situation

Room

Open

Data

Business

Intelligence

Other

Applications

Managing the Extraction and Uploading of Data

Sentilo

Social

Networks

Municipal

Info. systems

External

Info. Systems

Repository and

Treatment of the

City’s Analytical

Data

Sources of

Operational Data

Exploitation

of Results

Deﬁnition of the

City’s Data Model

Global Repository

of City Data

Modelling, Analyti-

cal and Predictive

Processes

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strategic objectives. The descriptive process

for the present and future state of the unit

helps to eliminate duplications and irrelevant

data, increases shared services, maximises

performance and promotes interrelation be-

tween areas. The AD must identify the functions

that need access to certain systems and which

proﬁles have access to what information and

under what circumstances. Requirements must

be deﬁned, based on attributes for accessing

sensitive information and they must be recor-

ded in the logging systems.

In regard to the emblematic City OS project, va-

rious sub-projects will be carried out, such as:

• Improvements to the ODI’s API. Im-

provement to Barcelona’s Open Data BCN (ODI)

portal, in order to focus on reuse and deve-

lopers, adding APP register capacities, access

control, news bulletin and improving API docu-

ments so that it is easy for developers to use.

• IGLU. Convergence of various datasets

in a uniﬁed storage solution (data lake) using

the City OS project’s standardisation and API

transformation, making use of new offers of key

infrastructures, adapting them to a new uniﬁed

operability standard.

• API standardisation. Deﬁning and putting

into practice standards in order to provide a gui-

de for purchasing technology, in order to ensure

the interoperability of City Council data providers.

• Protocols for opening open data. De-

ﬁning the protocol to be followed in order to

proactively include data in the open-data ca-

talogue, in particular for municipal civil servants

who are willing to do so.

• Connection with the DECODE infras-

tructure: Connecting City OS, IRIS, ASIA, SEN-

TILO and BCNOpenData to the experimental

DECODE platform (https://decodeproject.eu/)

Data is becoming increasingly important in

the Administration. It is necessary to design

a long-lasting strategy for carrying out City

Council projects, based on innovative data

exploitation, carrying out better analysis and

using big-data methodologies so as not to fall

behind society and the private sector. In this

sense, it is a good idea to learn from advanced

experiences in this ﬁeld, and the United States

is a good example.

Modern organisations are characterised by

the need for managing their services and pro-

cesses, fundamentally with a set of databases

which have multiplied in recent years and which

will continue to grow in the near future. In an or-

ganisation like Barcelona City Council, efﬁcient,

coordinated and structured data management

contributes to various objectives. Beyond spe-

ciﬁc, instrumental purposes for each database,

global governance must include two essential

objectives in a modern public organisation:

• Management with knowledge: se trata

de diseñar e implementar proyectos y servi-

cios basados en datos (data driven) haciendo

un uso intensivo de los datos, de metodolo-

gías de analítica de datos y de la data science

o ciencia de datos, para adaptar los servicios

a las necesidades reales de la ciudadanía, res-

ponder a problemas reales, identiﬁcar y ges-

tionar riesgos reales y reducir errores.

• Citizen empowerment: returning con-

trol of their data to city residents, by means of

municipal tools and processes, giving them the

possibility of deciding how their data is used

and for what purposes, and offering services

and projects that empower city residents and

give them more say on how the city is run.

7.4. Internal innovation based on data:

analysis and data-based projects

For example, see the document https://ash.harvard.edu/links/lessons-leading-cdos-framework-better-ci-

vic-analytics, May 2017.

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Barcelona City Council’s need to create

knowledge and intelligence has always been

and continues to be of strategic importance.

In recent years, the volume of information has

increased exponentially (big data). However,

municipal analytical tools cannot handle this

volume of information properly. The available

information is disperse (mostly in spreads-

heets), unconnected and subject to unplanned

maintenance. To counter this “hole”, various

initiatives have been set in motion to create a

culture of accessible, centralised data and the

corresponding culture to feed and, in the near

future, use the platform’s data. This includes

City OS, the project for a centralised munici-

pal information deposit that will facilitate the

capture, preparation, organisation and analysis

of data from municipal services and the gene-

ral public, in order to foster these data-based

projects through the City Council and outside

it (see the next section on open data).

The new data culture makes it possible for in-

formation and knowledge to ﬂow through the

organisation much more efﬁciently. However,

in today’s world, it is not enough to obtain and

analyse data in post-mortem processes. It is

necessary to have the capacity for analysing

data in real time and to be able to produce

projections and scenarios using complex algo-

rithms, in order to foresee and predict possible

future situations and reduce undesired reper-

cussions. This capacity cannot be substituted;

it must be internalised by the organisation, as

it is a major part of its grey matter. Until now,

digital service projects have been led by sec-

tors unrelated to data analysis or data science

(IT, transactional application managers, etc.).

In order to ensure that the data-analysis ma-

nagement model works smoothly, it is neces-

sary to move between the old model of busi-

ness intelligence, based on data selection and

visualisation, and a new data-science model

that leads to predictive analysis, prescriptive

analysis and artiﬁcial intelligence. From this

perspective, the MDO must play a relevant role

in the key areas of deﬁning and managing data,

as well as those of modelling, access, metada-

ta, quality and life cycles.

Analysis must answer the maximum number of

questions relating to various areas:

• City residents: improving the general pu-

blic’s satisfaction with municipal management,

the rationalisation of processes, increased efﬁ-

ciency, adaptation to new needs.

• Internal management: integrating analy-

sis into applications and indicators.

• Risk management: enriching services

with advanced analysis.

• Dissemination: providing higher value and

quality to analytical products in service to the

community, such as open data and statistics.

Along these lines, the MDO has the mission of

changing the organisation’s internal culture re-

garding data management in its projects. Given

that the data and technology associated with

this discipline are very new, the DMO must pro-

vide data-based analytical consultancy and so-

lution services to the other units. These services

must be accompanied by appropriate courses,

ensuring that every City Council unit is pro-

gressively trained, so that they understand the

methodology of a data-based qualitative focus

on city problems. It must also lead an internal

transformation, in order to “evangelise” the or-

ganisation in data culture, by means of internal

workshops and seminars. Within the DMO, an

analysis area must be created that offers inter-

nal services to various City Council areas, in the

form of “internal consultancy”, with one part

dedicated to solving problems and also training

personnel from each department on how to

use the developed tools.

As integral analytical elements, the DMO and

the analysis area must also collaborate in order

to establish the vision and strategy for all initia-

tives geared towards council data, the exchan-

ge of knowledge about data-administration po-

licies, standards and good practices, as well as

aligning technological tools to needs of use.

The emblematic projects in this area are:

• Comprehensive Information System

for Barcelona Economic Areas and Activi-

ties (EIAE): the creation of a corporate re-

ference database for strategic analysis in the

area of local economic development.

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• Monitoring gentriﬁcation: providing in-

formation and data in order to deﬁne responses

addressed at stopping the expulsion of local re-

sidents and retailers from city neighbourhoods.

• Municipal Management Dashboard: a da-

ta-visualisation tool that explains the state of the

city in real time.

• The Barcelona Metropolitan Housing

Observatory: Barcelona City Council, the

Barcelona Metropolitan Area, Barcelona Pro-

vincial Council and the Regional Government

of Catalonia have jointly created a supra-mu-

nicipal instrument for analysing and consulting

housing data. It is presented as a major tool for

city residents and administrations in questions

relating to housing. It is an instrument for eva-

luating and designing housing policies and de-

signing and consulting available housing data.

Barcelona City Council collects and regularly

publishes an important set of data, statistics,

indicators and sectoral studies concerning the

city and its surrounding area, so that urban lea-

ders, people in the ﬁeld of research, consultan-

cies and the entrepreneur community and the

general public can get precise knowledge about

the city, socio-demographic dynamics, the

economy, the urban area, the general public’s

opinion on various subjects, etc.

The objective of this work is to create the BCN

Data Exchange, an essential part of data com-

mons, and to organise, centralise and improve

the formats, the reusability (through interope-

rability) and access to the data published by

the City Council, from a technical perspective

(based on City OS) and a relational perspective,

and establish contact with groups of Barcelona

data users and reusers and attempt to show our

concept of data as a public asset that must be

shared under clear and transparent regulations.

The BCN Data Exchange project aims to con-

nect the city to data stakeholders, understand

their perception of data and try to build a fra-

mework that encourages the responsible use of

data and for data to be seen as a provider for

creating solutions and services rather than as

an owned asset that offers an advantage. Fur-

thermore the city will listen to their contribu-

tions on matters relating to public tenders and

data-exchange practices.

This line of action includes tasks dedicated to

processing and publishing city data, with the

infrastructure needed to do so, and to invol-

ving a community of professional data users

and proactive data consumers (prosumers) in

a constructive dialogue, covering the data as a

whole and the opening of infrastructures.

A major part of this information, which in-

cludes data of various kinds and formats (raw

data, indicators, statistical tables, opinion stu-

dies, surveys, maps, sectoral analyses, etc.), is

collected and published manually or semi-au-

tomatically through various municipal depart-

ments and websites.

• BCN Statistics, which includes access

to nearly 36,000 of the city’s statistical tables,

information by district and neighbourhood,

the historical archive of statistics year books

in PDF, as well as an application for consulting

and the dynamic generation of displays. Barce-

lona City Council’s Statistics Department spe-

cialises in the theory and practice of collecting

data and the analyses and presentations nee-

ded to turn them into useful information.

• Open Data BCN began in 2010. The

portal was presented in 2011, in order to make

certain datasets available to the general pu-

blic, including open data, or opening up public

sector information and allowing access and

reuse for the common good and for the bene-

7.5. Barcelona Data Exchange:

external data enhancing

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ﬁt of interested individuals and organisations.

The Open Data BCN project, which covers va-

rious pillars of the city’s strategy, is based on

the main international standards and recom-

mendations and adopts some characteristics

that sum up the principles of this movement.

• BCNROC is Barcelona City Council’s

open-access institutional repository, through

which the Council provides free access to its

public digital documents. BCNROC is an ad-

vanced search engine, using modern search

technology, that includes extensive descripti-

ve metadata in order to ensure that individual

users have a good experience in searching for

and reusing information. BCNROC eliminates

economic, technological and legal barriers for

accessing municipal digital documents and it

aims to guarantee permanent access to those

digital ﬁles. This tool makes it possible to co-

llect, store, manage, share, transform and dis-

seminate municipal information resources and

the associated metadata, as well as facilitating

searches and being able to access and reuse

them at a later date.

• CBAB is the catalogue of Barcelona City

Council libraries that contains descriptive

metadata on the internal and external infor-

mation resources that Barcelona City Council

needs for its everyday work, and offers a di-

rect link to online resources, which are avai-

lable to the council and all city residents, who

can consult them directly or ask to borrow

them through SEDAC.

• Barcelona Economía is the Barcelona

City Council website that monitors the city’s

economy, based on collection and evaluation

of how the main situation indicators for Bar-

celona and its Metropolitan Area are behaving.

Barcelona Economia includes a large number

of mainly economic tables and graphs, grou-

ped by sub-themes, which are usually accom-

panied by a brief analysis, as well as PDF do-

cuments on the economic situation, historical

publications, etc.

• The Survey and opinion-poll registry

includes opinion polls commissioned by the

City Council on the evaluation of services, use

of time, mobility, cultural consumption, etc.

Some of the results are already included in the

statistics portal, in table format, while others

are in document format.

• The Geoportal and web services for

Barcelona City Council’s Spatial Data Infras-

tructure make municipal territorial informa-

tion available through the website using Open

Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. The

need for creating a geoservice infrastructure

stems from a demand for both internal and

external management concerning the intero-

perability of territorial information.

• CartoBCN: is a website for downloading

Barcelona City Council cartography, aimed at

end users. It is a Department of Basic Infor-

mation and Cartography project which aims to

become Barcelona City Council’s centre of car-

tographic production.

With the aim of facilitating and promoting

the use of all this accumulated information

and knowledge, Barcelona City Council plans

to design and set in motion a new portal

for consulting and exploring information,

based on City OS, which centralises all the

currently managed and published information

and documents in a single website, i.e. to

create the Barcelona Data Exchange, with

various objectives:

• To centralise all the currently managed

and published information and documents in a

single website environment.

• To offer a new consultation experience

that is more dynamic, interactive and graphic,

where users can quickly explore the wide range

of information available.

• To add new functions for consuming, sha-

ring and disseminating information related to

Barcelona, addressed to various user proﬁles:

city residents, students, technical and research

personnel, etc.

• To open up a new environment for ex-

ploring and consulting information that is freer,

more direct and more user-friendly.

• To offer a new way of presenting more

graphic and more interactive information, with

greater capacity for sharing.

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• To have a new data architecture con-

nected to the City Council’s City OS, which

makes it possible to explore and show a di-

verse range of content (data in various for-

mats for later exploration, PDF documents,

pages and posts in HTML, etc.) and where it

is easier to administer and manage content.

This new Barcelona data portal will be aimed

at users with different proﬁles and needs,

from municipal political and technical per-

sonnel, who need to have access to vital,

complete information on the dynamics which

affect their decision-making, to normal city

residents who are looking for speciﬁc infor-

mation or who are curious about some urban

information or indicators. This involves con-

trolling security, by applying various proﬁles

and functions. Between these extremes the-

re are researchers, journalists and students,

who have different needs, in terms of the

type, quantity and amount of detail given in

city information.

With regard to the city’s current data repo-

sitory and website projects, the Barcelona

Data Exchange will improve access to infor-

mation and compliance with FAIR principles

for open scientiﬁc data with interoperable

data and standard formats.

• Improving the access and interoperability

of municipal statistical data on the city as a sys-

tem and its socio-economic, demographic and

urban planning reality, with reliable statistical

data that is efﬁcient and up-to-date, and now

interoperable and standardised.

• As a central feature of the “Barcelona

Digital City” data strategy, improving the func-

tions of Open Data BCN will foster a plural digital

economy with a new model of urban innovation

based on the digital transformation and inno-

vation of the public sector and collaboration

between companies, administrations, the aca-

demic world, organisations, communities and

people, with clear public and citizen leadership.

• BCNROC’s current stock of municipal do-

cuments already acts as a sole repository, used

by the other municipal websites that disseminate

municipal documents, and it will now be incor-

porated into the Barcelona Data Exchange. It’s

information is interoperable with other national

and international open-access repositories, as

it supports the OAI-PMH (Open Access Initiati-

ve Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) standards

and protocols and enables the reuse of docu-

ments using the most open Creative Commons

licenses possible. It also complies with the Dublin

Core metadata standards to help facilitate the

Semantic Web. These principles will be exten-

ded to the other datasets, whose managers will

be able to make good use of the experience and

competence of those in charge of BCNROC.

• Similarly, the Barcelona Economia data

will be more usable, and the ongoing register of

indicators will be made available to the public in

an organised series of data, as well as the infor-

mation and evaluation of methodological chan-

ges carried out to obtain them, which are rele-

vant for interpreting their evolution over time.

In this sense, initiatives for the “external” pu-

blication and evaluation of data include ac-

tions such as:

• Using and correlating existing da-

ta-science initiatives under the name of the

City Council, in order to generate a space in

the Open Data BCN portal where selected

scientists can contribute and maintain data.

• Using the “NUMA DataCity” programme

to set challenges for resolving city problems

and promote the conscious positioning of the

common-data programme’s objectives for en-

trepreneurs and emerging companies.

• Opening WiFi data: an API service provi-

ding access to Barcelona WiFi data while also

complying with privacy obligations.

• Opening Sentilo data: will be made acces-

sible to a wider public, with a protocol and API

for ofﬁcial access to Sentilo, in order to consult

information, and the appropriate documenta-

tion of all the datasets present on the platform.

The emblematic projects in this area are:

• BCN Data Store: this will be the public

library for services, easy to use and scalable as

the services offered by the Municipal Data Ofﬁ-

ce are developed.

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• BCNOpenData: the improvements to

BCNOpenData’s functionality make it possi-

ble to access and reuse the data generated or

kept by public bodies, for the common good

of interested people and organisations.

• Data City Challenges: ensuring the ut-

most efﬁciency in the services offered by the

City Council, we will use datasets and the city

as an experimental model for seeking solutions

to major urban problems.

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and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Emblematic

projects

The programme relating to the application of

a new strategy that uses data in decision-ma-

king. It is described in previous sections and

will be deployed throughout the organisation,

in a cross-departmental, multi-disciplinary

way, by setting in motion a set of projects.

These projects are structured around the

creation of the Municipal Data Office and the

development of a new architecture, where the

launching of the new design of repository for

data-lake information will be used to support

the entire data strategy, implemented through

the projects described below, as well as all

other future projects.

In this section, we present and provide a brief

description of the most relevant projects to be

undertaken in relation to this data programme,

some of which are at an advanced stage, and

which are known as “emblematic projects”

because of their content and relevance.

1. The Municipal Data Ofﬁce 2. City OS

3. Open Data BCN 4. DECODE

5. Data City Challenge 6. Data Exchange

7. Control Panel for the

Municipal Manager’s Ofﬁce

8. Monitoring gentriﬁcation

9. Economic Activities Census 10. Housing Observatory

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The Municipal Data Ofﬁce is a directorate

that includes various areas and departments

that are responsible for council data, and it

is charged with overseeing the application of

this measure. It is located in the Municipal

Manager’s Ofﬁce and it answers to the Com-

mission for Technology and Digital Information.

It is responsible for the management, quality,

governance and exploitation of data relating

to Barcelona City Council and all its associa-

ted bodies (public and private) that provide

services to the general public.

City OS is an advanced data analysis platform

with a unified concept of the city’s infor-

mation, based on free and open-code pro-

ducts that will be offered to the community.

It will help to detect problems in the city,

shorten response times and improve public

services by applying descriptive, predictive,

The Open Public Data movement is promoted

by public administrations, and its main objective

is to make the best possible use of available

public resources, publish the information ge-

nerated or kept by public bodies and to allow

access to it for its reuse for the common good

and for the beneﬁt of interested individuals

and organisations.

The Open Data BCN project began in 2010

and has since been evolving to foster a plural

digital economy while developing a new mo-

del for urban innovation based on the digital

transformation and innovation of the public

sector and the involvement of companies,

administrations, the academic world, organi-

sations, communities and people, under clear

In particular the department of Data Analytics

will be created in the DMO. This is an ofﬁce

for analysing multi-disciplinary data and it will

oversee the proper management of and res-

pect for the general public’s digital rights. It

will use public data to provide information that

helps to resolve the challenges facing the city,

as well as providing services for the various

municipal units. It will also have a role in the

internal training and encouragement of City

Council personnel.

simulation and modelling analysis, as well as

pattern recognition. The City Council’s ma-

nager’s offices and service departments will

be able to use this data platform to make a

more accurate analysis of information and

therefore implement better public policies

for the general public.

public and citizen leadership. The Open Data

BCN project, which covers various pillars of

the city’s strategy, is based on the main in-

ternational standards and recommendations

and adopts some characteristics that sum up

the principles of this movement.

• Open data by default

• Quality and quantity of information

• Data for everyone

• Data for improving governance

• Fostering innovation

8.1. The Municipal Data Ofﬁce

8.2. City OS

8.3. Open Data BCN

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DECODE is a European pilot project being

developed in Barcelona and Amsterdam to

manage data sovereignty in a shared economy.

The technical solutions being developed in this

project will be used to improve services for

citizens, making them more secure while fur-

ther safeguarding data ownership and control.

DECODE will explore how to build a digital

economy focused on data, where the data

generated and compiled by the general pu-

Continuing with the approach of maximising

the use of resources (data) in order to im-

prove the efficiency of City Council services,

Data City Challenges will use datasets and the

city as an experimentation model for seeking

solutions to major urban challenges (housing,

unemployment, exclusion, health, energy and

mobility) and they will develop prototypes with

the most skilled stakeholders in the innova-

The BCN Data Store, to be developed by Bar-

celona City Council, is one step further along

the path initiated with the BCNOpenData pro-

ject. It aims to facilitate access to the data

kept by the city, people and organisations for

the common good (data commons).

It will also develop a philosophy that empha-

sises the exploitation of the city’s data in all

areas of the city’s political activity and will

help to promote a clear “city data market”

culture of exchange for both the public and

private sectors.

blic, the internet of things and the network of

sensors will be available for the common good

(data commons), safeguarded by appropriate

privacy protection.

As a result, innovators, emerging companies,

NGOs, cooperatives and local communities

can make use of this information to create

applications and services that respond to their

needs and those of the community in general.

tive ecosystem. These projects (challenges)

will make it possible to test and subsequently

adopt clearly defined and delimited solutions,

while fostering collaboration between emer-

ging companies, other companies and the

public sector. It will encourage the use of

data for the common good (data commons),

improve public services, foster the economy

and social return on public spending.

BCN Data Store will be a public library for

services, easy to use and scalable as the ser-

vices offered by the Municipal Data Office

are developed. In order to bring this about,

the “platform as a service” (PaaS) concept

will be used.

It will include communities and social groups

in all services and will try to establish a ne-

twork of people, member bodies, members,

reviewers, friends and followers. This strategy

must allow day to day improvement and main-

tain direct contact with the general public,

as well as with data-science professionals

(from research or companies) and students.

8.4. DECODE

8.5. Data City Challenge

8.6. BCN Data Exchange

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In addition to developing a dashboard for the

government team, there will also be a free

application for city residents that shows a

summary of strategic indicators and provi-

des data on City Council services, along with

management indicators for their projects,

Monitoring gentriﬁcation is a cross-depart-

mental City Council project that aims to deﬁne

ways of stopping the expulsion of local resi-

dents and retailers from city neighbourhoods.

Furthermore, the idea is to also design and

implement a coordinated strategy of measures

and actions that neutralises and reverses gen-

triﬁcation processes in the city, by defending

city residents’ rights in their neighbourhoods.

Barcelona City Council’s Department of

Commerce is promoting the development

of the Comprehensive Information System

for Barcelona’s Economic Areas and Activi-

ties, (EIAE), with the aim of responding to

the lack of comprehensive information on

economic activities, as well as areas that are

liable to contain them, through the creation

of an information system that integrates and

normalises date on economic activities.

This database will be the municipal reference

for the strategic analysis of local development.

progress made on accomplishing government

commitments, the general public’s evaluations,

etc. This service is an important step towards

greater transparency in municipal management

and public scrutiny.

This is one of the city’s most urgent, key pro-

jects, and it requires a complex analysis in

various areas, including population, housing,

economic activities and tourism. For this pro-

ject, our mission is to identify the key variables

involved in this process, deﬁne the gaps in in-

formation and provide an analysis and diagnosis

that can be used as a basis for establishing new

policies that can tackle this problem.

Furthermore, it will form the basis for building

up products and services addressed to the

city’s commerce and local economic structure,

both internally and for external developers,

who are service providers in this area.

Conceptually, it will be an open node within

the information-systems network. IT applica-

tions, and especially the integration system

(internal and external interoperability) will be

built with the new agile development metho-

dology using free and open-source software.

8.7. Municipal Management Dashboard

8.8. Monitoring gentriﬁcation

8.9. Comprehensive Information System for

Barcelona’s Economic Areas and Activities,

EIAE (Economic Activities Census)

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

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and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Barcelona’s Housing Observatory is a supra-mu-

nicipal instrument founded with the aim of

providing a holistic perspective on housing, in

order to tackle housing problems in the Bar-

celona Metropolitan Area. It is promoted by

various administrations: Barcelona City Council,

the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, Barcelona

Provincial Council, the Generalitat of Cata-

lonia and the Association of Social Housing

Managers (GHS).

Knowledge concerning the housing sector and

the residential situation of the population from

various angles is a primary need and an essen-

tial condition for designing sensible, rigorous

The schedule for carrying out the emblematic

projects relating to the new municipal-data

strategy is as follows.

and effective strategies and public policies.

The Observatory is therefore an instrument

that is able to provide all the necessary infor-

mation and tools for evaluating and designing

policies that must be undertaken in this area.

Additionally, as society has advanced in terms

of knowledge and the democratic demand for

information, it must also be a body that pro-

vides city residents with information.

The aim is to ﬁll in the information “black ho-

les” while also providing detailed information

about the territory, which is often not available

in large, wide-ranging statistical operations.

8.10. Housing Observatory

Budget and schedule

Project

Budget

2018 2019

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2

The Municipal Data Office 680 K

City OS Services 1.132 K

BCN Open Data 56 K

DECODE 545 K

Data City Challenge 180 K

BCN Data Exchange

130 K

Municipal Management

Dashboard

235 K

Monitoring gentrification

Recursos

propios

Census/EIAE 500 K

Housing Observatory 349 K

Barcelona Ciutat Digital

Government measure concerning ethical management

and accountable data: Barcelona Data Commons

Appendices

09.1 DIRECTIVE CONCERNING MUNICIPAL DATA GOVERNANCE

AND THE MUNICIPAL DATA OFFICES