Outreach to the Disability Community

Persons with disabilities face multiple layers of marginalization and require specific services to participate in civic decision-making. Municipalities often offer such services within departmental silos—social workers operate separately from legal professionals, who are far removed from healthcare.

Smart city tools can bridge access to the disability community by making municipal services accessible. Access to services remotely will encourage and facilitate participation by citizens who previously faced barriers in accessing municipal services. This will allow the municipality to consider the multi-layered issues faced by the disability community and improve the entire community’s access to municipal services.

Technologies

Free municipal WIFI. Municipalities cannot use smart city tools to reach the disability community if residents lack access to the internet. Adding WIFI routers to public areas that are accessible to the disability community will improve online access to services.

Digital accessibility maps. Municipal maps driven by resident-contributed data can rate the accessibility of different areas in the municipality. Residents will have access to information on accessibility such as whether a particular location has a ramp, braille text, and automatic doors.

Service delivery telephone systems. Residents may dial in for information on municipal services such as transportation, request accommodations for public events, and be updated on changes to municipal disability policies.

Customer Service Applications. Designing applications that combine multidisciplinary professional services (legal, medical, or social) can resolve the multi-layered issues people with disability face without having to redirect the resident to a variety of services. The application can screen an issue and identify what type of professional the resident needs. These applications can also assist the wider resident community as anyone can utilize this service.

Managing Liabilities

Privacy

Issues.

⚠️ Using public WIFI provided by the municipality to complete personal tasks may risk breach of an individual’s personal information.

⚠️ Some provinces have passed provincial health privacy legislation, such as Ontario’s Personal Health Information Act, 2004, to protect sensitive health information. Such data should only be accessible to certain types of professionals. Legal professionals, healthcare professionals, and social workers have different ethical obligations towards their clients that must be taken into account when integrating services. If confidential information relating to a person’s health is disclosed to third parties, it may lead to discrimination.

Managing Issues

✅ Inform users of privacy issues pertaining to public WIFI. Include a disclaimer so residents are aware of the risks they take when they use public WIFI.

✅ Use VPNs. Include access to a free VPN to assist residents with tasks involving personally identifying information.

✅ Don’t track. Civic engagement tools don’t necessarily need to track identities. Employ tools that don’t associate individuals with content.

✅ De-identify at the source. Many tools allow for engagement without collecting personal information. Doing so at the source helps prevent privacy issues from cropping up later.

✅ De-identify as soon as possible. If personal information absolutely must be collected, it should be stripped away as soon as possible.

✅ Limit data collection to only that which is needed. Data collection strategies aggregate engagement numbers and location-less data collection rather than individual-specific engagement locales avoid engaging more serious privacy concerns.

✅ Ensure that individual professionals (legal, medical, or social) are following their ethical and regulatory obligations. When integrating multidisciplinary services, ensure that each professional is upholding their privacy obligations under relevant legislation. Only provide necessary personal information on the resident to each professional.

✅ Follow good privacy practices.