Since we announced the launch of the 2022 DTPR City Cohort, we’ve been working with the four participating municipalities — the Angers-Loire metropolitan region, the Town of Innisfil, the City of Boston, and the District of Columbia — to deploy the Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR) standard in their communities.

Along the way, we’re hosting virtual workshops for the staff involved to share successes and challenges during the deployment process and facilitate peer learning between cities. Despite being spread out across three countries and time zones, there’s been a lot of enthusiasm to come together and discuss their experiences.

We started the DTPR City Cohort Program with a “DTPR 101” workshop for the participants to introduce internal stakeholders to the DTPR standard and their municipality’s participation in the cohort-based pilot program. This was followed by a cohort kickoff session, where each municipality identified how DTPR fits into their existing initiatives/strategies and discussed desired outcomes from the pilot.

We want to stay true to DTPR’s open-source nature by publicly sharing questions and learnings emerging from the cohort program. Here are some key learnings from our first two workshops:

Understanding the value of DTPR for municipalities

In a discussion on the reasons behind why the four municipalities joined the cohort, some key themes surfaced:

• Enabling transparency and discoverability for residents — Building community awareness of the project and providing access to details about the technologies being piloted.
• Building a feedback loop — Having a formal, standardized mechanism for gathering and responding to feedback from the public about public technology.
• Aligning with larger strategies and policies — Supporting tech deployment by providing a methodology for gathering information from vendors, as well as sharing that information out to uphold values like Boston’s Public Data Principles or regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

DTPR deployment brings together three workstreams

Through discussion with the cohort participants about the steps involved to deploy DTPR in their cities, we realized the deployment process brings together three workstreams that are often siloed within municipal governments:

• Place-based design and delivery — Designing the DTPR signage and identifying where the signs should be installed so that residents will notice and interact with them.
• Technology implementation and innovation — Gathering details from the vendor on how the technology and data collection process will work.
• Community and stakeholder engagement — Enabling interaction and feedback from the public, by developing a localized communications plan to raise resident awareness about the pilot project.

We believe bringing these threads together alongside DTPR, which is designed to help people understand and engage with public technologies, can help realize some of the promises of “smarter cities.”

Get internal alignment early in the process

Partly because of how DTPR deployment brings together these three workstreams, it’s important for municipalities to bring internal stakeholders and vendors into the DTPR deployment process early on. This may include:

• Communications staff who can provide guidance on how best to inform and engage the public, and which community groups and external stakeholders to reach out to.
• Customer service staff who will need to know how to respond to resident questions and concerns about the project.
• Operations staff who may need to provide input on where and how to install the technologies and DTPR signage.
• Vendors who will need to provide information on the technology and coordinate installation of the technologies.

Other internal stakeholders who can begin analyzing the data being collected and figuring out how to move forward with the findings.

Stay tuned

Watch for more blog posts soon on further learnings and updates from the 2022 DTPR City Cohort, as well as details about each city’s pilot.