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From YouTube: Committee on Environment & Sustainability on December 12, 2017

Description

Docket #1465 - A hearing to accept and expend a grant from the James L. Knight Foundation in the amount of $200,000.00 to fund the deployment of sensors in urban environments.

B

Chris, yes, so you know, we I mean we get two phone calls every day from some tech company or firm wanting to experiment in the city streets, which is a great thing you know, Boston is, is the hive of innovation here and but one of the problems is, you know, there's no real, clear gate, keeping process for how we determine who gets to put in a sensor or try a smart city experiment and for whom that's benefiting and what sort of civic value is actually being produced, and there are clear fine lines between what these companies are after on an experimental research or you know so the product and in what would benefit the people of the city, and so what the betablox project really is, is I'm trying to take a step back and think more deeply about the values behind and how we decide to go forward with certain experiments who we want to work with and for whom these technologies are serving and who they're leaving out that's a huge factor in the whole smart study, Internet of Things ecosystem, and so you know, I think the betablox process is it's less of well we're aiming it, so it's less of a specific thing that we're throwing in the streets, but rather an invitation to the community and to companies and researchers and researchers and whoever was interested to help guide the conversation over what we do and so from this you know, we hope to create a kind of clearinghouse between community issues, questions challenges, concerns and these tech companies, researchers, artists, designers, people who may have something that can help in some way.