
For years, cities and communities have been raising their voices about the importance of privately held data for their city management; to know where traffic flows are, where tourists come from or what consumer purchasing patterns are in certain parts of town. These data are regularly collected by companies, but for various reasons, are often not shared or not shared in a format useful for policy-making. Research shows that some approaches already exist to tap into such data, but they are often sub-optimal and do not scale up. A series of business-to-government (B2G) workshops are organised to discuss such approaches; the first three workshops have focused on the experiences of cities in accessing data, while today's workshop gave an insight to the perspective of the private sector.