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Municipal governments and place management organizations across the globe are committed to fostering a more transparent and participatory approach to deploying technology in public spaces. And the Digital Trust for Places & Routines (DTPR) standard – stewarded by Helpful Places – is helping them reach their goals.
The DTPR standard has continued to see increasing adoption, with Helpful Places supporting six new deployments of DTPR last year. The standard has now been implemented in 13 communities – and counting – across North America, Europe and Australia.
As the City of Long Beach implements innovative technologies to meet local needs, it needed a way to facilitate a dialogue with residents about the kinds of solutions they wanted to see. Working with Helpful Places, Long Beach set up an improved Digital Rights Platform that uses DTPR. Having public-facing information about multiple technologies in one place enabled Long Beach to conduct community Data Walks and focus groups to engage residents on the way Long Beach is embracing technology. Today, signs using DTPR stand in public spaces across Long Beach, and dozens of technologies are described on the Digital Rights Platform with more on the way.
Michigan Central is a 30-acre campus in Detroit serving as a real-world test bed for urban transportation solutions. With dozens of startups trialing technologies on campus and in the surrounding neighbourhood, Michigan Central needed a way to ensure residents are informed about the technology pilots taking place in their community. In collaboration with Helpful Places, Michigan Central has set up a transparency portal providing information about the different technologies being tested and is installing physical signage for certain pilots.
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We also wrapped up the Knight Community DTPR Program with the City of West Palm Beach’s deployment of DTPR to support the Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3).
The CS3 is developing technology solutions to understand how people move and interact within West Palm Beach, so the City can make informed decisions on how to address community needs, reduce congestion, and allocate resources more effectively. A key part of the initiative is involving residents to ensure the technologies developed are community-driven and trusted by residents.
With a combination of online information and physical signage, Helpful Places was able to aid CS3 in publicly communicating about existing technology deployments. This information also supported public engagement, in the form of focus groups, to gather input about potential technology use cases to ensure solutions developed by the CS3 have community buy-in.
As part of its Smart Cities program, The City of Calgary recently launched its Wave Tech Centre, which enables City teams to explore new and emerging technologies that improve service delivery for Calgarians. As part of the launch of the new centre, we ran a hands-on and participatory session with City of Calgary staff, we discussed the challenges and opportunities in creating greater digital transparency. We also explored how DTPR can support public communication on Calgary’s innovative technology deployments and help build resident trust.
Last year, the 17th arrondissement of Paris launched OpenBatignolles, a smart city initiative centered on citizen transparency and engagement. The project began with replacing 255 streetlights with LED technology that can adjust brightness levels at night—expected to save 96,000 kWh of energy annually—and installing 160 multi-purpose sensors from Upciti, a privacy-focused vendor of smart city technology, to monitor urban traffic flows and noise levels.
Mayor Geoffroy Boulard and his team prioritized citizen understanding and comfort with the deployed technologies from the project's inception. With guidance from CIVITEO, Helpful Places and Upciti, they deployed DTPR on signage and on the city’s website to ensure transparency.
Porto Digital is a non-profit organization promoting digital technology and innovation projects in the context of the Porto Municipality. We worked with Porto Digital to deploy DTPR and use the Helpful Places Platform for five technologies installed across the city, including CCTV cameras, public wifi routers, and sensors for weather, noise monitoring, and air quality. The goal of the deployment was to test how using DTPR can promote citizens’ understanding of the sensors Porto uses, and increase their trust in how Porto deploys technology. Preliminary results show that residents found the solution clear and informative, and the majority thought it was an effective response to the need for citizen transparency and education.
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Bristol Temple Meads Station is home to the UK’s first Station Innovation Zone. Delivered by Connected Places Catapult in partnership with Network Rail and funded by Innovate UK, new technologies are being tested here to improve the passenger experience and station operations. This presented an opportunity to use the DTPR standard to raise the visibility of station pilots, and to bring more transparency and community engagement to the station’s use of technology. Using the Helpful Places Platform, a transparency portal was set up for six pilots, with two pilots having their own additional signage. Results indicate that station goers appreciate the increased level of transparency, and have more insight and awareness into technology pilots at the station than ever before.
Helpful Places accomplished so much with the DTPR standard, in collaboration with our partners, over the last year. And it caught the attention of organizations around the world.
DTPR was a shortlisted nominee for the 2024 PICCASO Awards Canada in the Most Impactful Privacy Service or Product category.
The Town of Innisfil’s deployment of DTPR was also featured in the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario’s Transparency Showcase.
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In addition to winning the Trusted IoT Service Award at the 2024 Australian IoT Awards for their deployment of DTPR, the Sydney Olympic Park Authority released a case study summarizing the learnings and outcomes from their use of the standard.
Sydney Olympic Park was the first place in the Southern Hemisphere to deploy DTPR, so we were thrilled to see their efforts bringing transparency to public realm technologies recognized and celebrated.
Building upon the work at Sydney Olympic Park, Transport for New South Wales published a DTPR Deployment Guide to help place managers and local councils use the standard themselves to help their communities understand the data governance and privacy protections supporting the use of smart technologies in public spaces.
2024 was a very exciting and busy year for Helpful Places and the DTPR standard. We're grateful to all the partners and collaborators who made the impactful projects outlined above possible.
We look forward to building on this exciting progress in 2025 by helping organizations deploy technology in ways that foster community understanding and trust.
