The city of Maceió hosted on September 5th and 6th an international conference promoted by the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, UN Habitat, National Coalition of Mayors from Brazil and Maceió City Hall. During two days, cities and international organisations had the opportunity to share best practices and ongoing projects in the field of digital services, especially in the topics of data protection, use of artificial intelligence and digital inclusion. For Brazilian representatives, it was the chance to hear about Helsinki’s experience in providing reliable, proactive and efficient digital public services, and what steps were taken to accomplish the developments in the field.
To inaugurate the conference, Tomas Lehtinen, Head of Data from the city of Helsinki, delivered a lecture on aspects of data and emerging technologies adopted in the public services offered by the city. Helsinki has embraced an ambitious vision in its data strategy: to make data produced by the city of Helsinki the most usable and most used urban data by 2025. To accomplish this objective, the city’s Administration shifted from a reactive to a proactive service delivery paradigm, and from an outright exploitation of data to a human-centric perspective on the use of data.
In the field of use of artificial intelligence, Tomas noted that the city of Helsinki has evolved to predict maintenance of metro wagons based on AI analysis of train fault signals, to develop a register of AI systems used as part of the city’s services, and to adopt contractual clauses for the procurement of ethical AI. Regarding generative AI, there is an ongoing experimentation of the Microsoft365 Copilot by public staff, to produce lessons on what kind of tasks the tool is beneficial for and to increase readiness of the workforce to utilize AI in their work. Finally, Tomas registered that all the city’s projects in AI are guided by eight ethical principles: people-oriented, transparency, explainability, fairness and equality, responsibility and maintaining trust, privacy, security, under human control.
On the second day, Jasmin Repo, Senior Data Analyst from the City of Helsinki, shared the projects developed by the city and the outcomes of the collaboration efforts within the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights (CC4DR). The city of Helsinki leads one of CC4DR’s mission – provide proactive digital services that meet residents’ needs – and has established a taskforce to better understand how to use and promote individual’s consent in personal data-based service development in cities, according to the MyData principles.
MyData is a paradigm that recognises the right of individuals to access and control their personal data collected by third parties. During 2024, Helsinki’s administration upheld five workshops for knowledge sharing and debates about legal aspects of consent base personal data sharing, data intermediaries, data sharing ecosystems, citizens empowerment, and technological challenges, such as interoperability. On September 19th, the final workshop focused on the future of MyData and crafting the roadmap towards proactive people centred data sharing services.
Jasmin also highlighted that cities are joining forces to celebrate international digital rights days, on December 10th & 11th, an initiative coordinated by Bordeaux Métropole and the city of Maceió, and supported by CC4DR, Eurocities, UN Habitat, and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), to accomplish Mission 6 of CC4DR: make digital rights part of the global agenda.
