Improving Data-Ecosystems for Sustainable Cities
With the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s Turkey Office (FNF), the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) has been running the program titled Supporting Sustainable Cities since 2016.
In the last two years, the program has focused on data-driven decision-making as an essential component of designing sustainable cities. TESEV’s 2019 report New Tools for Supporting Urban Policy: Open Data Platforms and Urban Dashboards, published with the support of FNF, has explored a number of online platforms for data-based decision-making that bring together public, private, and civil sectors, as well as academia and city governments in an effective cooperation. While the 2019 TESEV-FNF partnership focused on the utilization of data in decision-making, this year’s project is designed to highlight the need for effective networks that connect these actors for maintaining a workable data-ecosystem. Given that a working cooperation among stakeholders is essential for effective sharing of data, the concept of “data-ecosystem” is gaining more and more significance in discussions regarding sustainable cities across the world. With the increased significance of the concept, comes the question: how can we build an effective data-ecosystem?
To that end, TESEV hosted a Web Seminar on July 14, 2020 bringing together panelists from key institutions and sectors that need to work together for an effective “data-ecosystem” in Turkey. TESEV’s Research Director, Dr. Itır Akdoğan, moderated the discussion among representatives from key sectors including the civil society, academia/research, private sector, and local government. The answers by panelists –Prof. Dr. Emre Erdoğan (Istanbul Bilgi Univ.); Güler Sağıt (Izmir Metropolitan Municipality); Neslihan Öztürk (Bernard van Leer Foundation); Murat Tülek (Urban Researcher)– provoked a productive and engaged discussion for an improved data-ecosystem in local governance in Turkey. During the seminar, all 177 registered attendees were given the opportunity submit questions, which were answered by the panelists at the end of the session.
The video recording of the seminar is currently being prepared for editing for publication. Once completed, the video will be published online, and disseminated through social media to reach an even wider audience. The web seminar, by urging us to think through the idea of a “data-ecosystem”, invites us to think of or to approach data in a manner that is more conducive to data-driven decision making –a fundamental component for governing sustainable cities.