When 'doing ethics' meets public procurement of smart city technology – an Amsterdam case study

[A] multi-stakeholder co-design project – including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the process in which the service is designed and realized

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Since 2023

Amsterdam

by De Kreek, Mike ; Alfrink, Kars ; De Waal, Martijn ; Kortuem, Gerd ; Turel, Thijsc ; Visser, Bart ; Samson, Laurens City governments increasingly experiment with civic participation in the procurement and the realization of smart city technologies in order to improve the incorporation of human values. In this paper, a model is proposed with the level of participation, the continuity of participation and the extent of institutional embedding to illustrate how challenging these experiments are. The City of Amsterdam also experiments with its procurement approach for a new camera car service that ensures an ethically responsible, privacy-friendly and secure collection of images from public space. Two starting points drive this change: 1) in order to have more control over the data, the municipality develops its own machine learning models for processing the images and 2) a multi-stakeholder co-design project – including a citizen panel – is an integral part of the process in which the service is designed and realized. To support this new procurement process, a group of design-researchers were involved in a collaborative case study to identify requirements relevant for the tender. An analysis of the case study findings along the three dimensions brings us to the conclusion that the approach developed by the City of Amsterdam is a fruitful encounter between ‘doing ethics’ and procurement. The lessons of this procurement approach for ‘doing ethics’ are claimed to be of value for other practical contexts and further research.