The first European Data Trust to manage water, electricity and gas data
By editorial team. (Original publication in Spanish).
Is it possible to take a more active role in managing your data? How can citizens contribute to co-design a platform to find out how they consume? Given the absence of consumption data that makes it difficult to make conscious and responsible decisions that help alleviate climate change, with access and granularity limitations, and especially the lack of knowledge about the problem, the project DATALOG was born.
This initiative, winner of the Ciutat Proactiva 2022 program promoted by BIT Habitat –Barcelona City Council's strategy to promote urban innovation– plans to implement a Data Trust in the Barcelona metropolitan area that allows, through participation, to promote the use of citizen data, local businesses and other water, electricity and gas stakeholders. Based on the participation of a community of citizens who will share their data, through methods of privacy protection and anonymization, a platform will be created to promote urban research and understand how cities work, what resources they use, and how people move.
Specifically, by participating in DATALOG citizens will be able to:
Know the impact of the city on the carbon footprint. With DATALOG they will be able to deepen their knowledge about their consumption to make more responsible and sustainable decisions that will help to better manage day-to-day life.
Promote responsible consumption. By knowing when and how they consume more, they will be able to contribute to improving their consumption in a more conscious way, avoiding peak energy hours that will help reduce emissions.
Control abnormal rates. What is my consumption pattern? Can I improve my energetic behaviour? By identifying anomalous events, DATALOG will allow a more sustainable and efficient management to be achieved.
Create personalized reports on your own consumption. The platform will promote sustainable and personalized development for consumers.
What is a Data Trust?
First of all, what do we mean when we talk about Data Trust? It is a fiduciary entity that will be in charge of protecting data privacy while promoting research.
Based on this platform, DATALOG will develop a data governance system with citizen participation principles that offers access to data through anonymization and aggregation algorithms that, in turn, designs visualization and prediction tools that will help to understand consumption in the city, improve its management and reduce its carbon footprint.
Citizen participation and data community
DATALOG starts from the co-design of the data management platform as the backbone of the project. Citizens play a fundamental role when defining the forms of data governance, the licenses for use and visualization, and/or consultations on the institutionality of the Data Trust.
Thus, a month ago the first meeting with the first participants took place, a group of experts in the field who shared their ideas when launching the Data Trust. During the session, the main concepts and objectives of the project were presented. In addition, the workshop served to learn about and exchange opinions about the platform, including: personalized notifications every time your consumption is abnormal, recommendations to improve energy efficiency, real-time data or comparing my consumption with that of my neighbors, were some of the ideas of the participants.
Answer the survey!
We have launched a survey to find out the energy and water and gas consumption behavior of citizens. In addition, the form will make it possible to deepen the level of knowledge of consumption itself, what concerns citizens have in this regard and what they would like to explore more, how they manage their data and to what extent they would allow them to be donated for research.
These and many other topics to investigate in the panorama of citizen consumption. You can answer the survey here:
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