Hi Carolin and Aristide,

I have a question about dealing with private data. In one of the first sessions you mentioned that if there is private data we should store it somewhere (is a local computer/external hard drive fine?) and then add the description of the dataset on the MoC dashboard to show that you actually have the data. The issue is however, that it then still is not possible to make nice flow diagrams with this data online as the data cannot become public. How will we deal with this? Can we make the flow diagrams ourselves? Is there an offline version of this to be able to still share the private data internally in the municipality of Apeldoorn?

This is a general question that the municipality has also asked me which we briefly have talked about before starting the course. Now, I have a specific example for it. I have found some information from LMA (National waste reporting database, www.lma.nl). The information is on quantities of waste materials coming from and going to Apeldoorn which would be very interesting to use for understanding the material flows of Apeldoorn. I could try to anonimize data and see if LMA agrees that there are possibilities of making parts of the data public to be able to load it into the MoC dashboard. However, then it must be clear what the benefits of that approach are. In the end the data is most relevant for Apeldoorn itself and perhaps even more useful for the municipality when it is not anonymous. Also, perhaps in the near future similar cases as this one will occur so I am curious what you think of this and how we can deal with this appropriately.

Many thanks!

Madzy

Hi Madzy,
1) Aside from the LMA example, do you have any other examples for what "private" data means? Yes, we had suggested that the data could be stored on a google drive or basecamp, because this way it is password controlled, but you still have a link that you can put in the URL field. Alternatively, you can of course store it locally and then simply make a note in the uploader notes in which folder you have that or the name of the file.

2) It is true that you won't be able to make any visualisations on the Data Hub and you also won't be able to process the data with our system either. For the flow diagrams, it is usually composed of various single data points, extracted from different sources, e.g. vegetable production and household waste production will come from different files. Therefore, you could still get a single datapoint from a private source without having issues that a company is revealed etc.

3) There is no offline version of our system that you could work with, but there are other tools to make flow diagrams of course. However, the city will then not be able to take advantage of their online dashboard and all other visualisations and calculation options that we foresee.

4) LMA data. We have friends and former colleagues from TU Delft and geoFluxus, who have been granted full access to the LMA dataset and they do cool work with it (so the LMA people definitely know what the benefits of their data is), see article and links to TU Delft article within it here. They have told us previously that it may be possible that Rijkswaterstaat may open this dataset up if it is requested by more people. Rijkswaterstaat, is of course also a partner in CityLoops, so perhaps there is an easier way in and you could check with Jeroen to see what he thinks. If you go this route, we will try to support you, because we agree that the "not-anonymous" data will bring most useful results for Apeldoorn.

Curious to hear you thoughts too and see what you/Apeldoorn will make of it.