SCC-IRG: Creating a community-focused Data Management Platform

California State University-Long Beach Foundation
Abstract

This multi-disciplinary project aims to promote better data governance practices and bolster trust through the development of a Data Management Platform in Long Beach, Calif. The Platform is designed to support community access to information generated by smart city technologies. The project takes a user-centric participatory design approach to the development, evaluation and refinement of a Platform designed to enable people to readily discover and learn about the data civic technologies collect about them as they engage in routine activities, such as using the bike share or passing by a traffic camera. The new Platform will enable city residents to not only discover what data is collected about them but to also limit data practices with which they are not comfortable. The resulting Data Management Platform is expected to help close the gap between the discursive and material aspects of data privacy policy. Today, dozens of U.S. cities have adopted data privacy guidelines—without being able to take practical and effective next steps to implement or enforce them. At full scale, the Data Management Platform will make data practices associated with civic technologies more obtainable for Long Beach’s nearly 500,000 residents, potentially bolstering trust in local government. The project’s methodology and technical solutions are scalable and transferable to other cities.

This project centers around the design, evaluation and refinement of an IoT mobile assistant that empowers people to exercise privacy choices. Part of this research will involve developing a simple taxonomy of privacy choices and data practices that enable city residents to specify ahead of time opt-in/opt-out choices, and develop support for authenticating users and functionality. The researchers will also develop a Privacy Dashboard that can help users review what data about them might have been collected over the past day or week. Formative evaluation and user testing will inform refinements to the mobile privacy assistant and other elements of the Data Management Platform. The project’s methodology and technical solutions are scalable and transferable to cities beyond Long Beach.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

  • Performance Period
    September 2025 - August 2028
  • California State University-Long Beach Foundation
  • Award Number
    2426911
Gwen Shaffer

Gwen Shaffer is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Public Relations and Director of Research for the College of Liberal Arts. Her telecommunications policy research examines the complex nature of social exclusion in the informational age. Her current research focuses on the data privacy implications of “smart city” technologies such as surveillance cameras, automated license plate readers and sensors. She is the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project focused on the City of Long Beach’s vision to use data in ethical ways that avoid reinforcing existing racial biases and discriminatory decision-making. Shaffer served on the City of Long Beach’s Technology and Innovation Commission—which advises the mayor and City Council on relevant policy and initiatives—from January 2015 until December 2022. (She chaired the Commission from January 2019 until her term ended). In this role, Shaffer contributed to policies involving digital inclusion and equity; the City’s use of surveillance technologies; the City’s open data portal; and Long Beach’s Smart City initiative. Shaffer designed and teaches JOUR 360/Culture and Politics of the Internet. In this course, students consider the economic, legal and networking aspects of prominent telecommunications policy issues. They engage in critical debate about how to regulate technologies integral to their daily lives. Shaffer’s research has published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction; the Journal of Information Policy; Media, Culture & Society; First Monday; and the Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Internet Technology, among other journals. The National Science Foundation; the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation; the Media, Inequality & Change Center; and METRANS Transportation Center have funded her research. Prior to attending graduate school, Shaffer worked as a reporter for more than a dozen years. She covered local politics for the Philadelphia City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly, and was an editorial assistant at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. Her freelance articles have been published in The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, E/The Environmental Magazine, Philadelphia magazine, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. Shaffer earned her Ph.D. in mass media and communication from Temple University in Philadelphia. Before joining the faculty at CSULB, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the computer science department at the University of California, Irvine.