Smart Cities Panel 6 - Abbey Stemler, Brett M. Frischmann, Salome Viljoen, Doc Searls, Milton Mueller: Government's, Data, and Society: Asking the Right Questions

Smart cities require governance, specifically governance of intelligence and intelligence-enabled control. In fact, in some very important respects, smart cities should be dumb, and that will take governance. One way to quickly see the point is by way of analogy to the Internet and the decades-long and still ongoing debate about network neutrality. The end-to-end architecture of the Internet and open Internet regulation aim to govern certain uses of intelligence—and thus intelligence-enabled control—by infrastructure owners. Network neutrality is about engineering a governance seam between layers, and cities will face very similar challenges for many different infrastructures and services. This analysis is really just illustrative of a deeper set of questions that need to be asked and carefully deliberated by communities going down the smart city path. Drawing from two different research agendas and books—Governing Knowledge Commons and Re-Engineering Humanity—I will outline the set of questions and explain their importance.